Relationships, Training, and Formal Agreements Between Needle and Syringe Programs and Police
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Needle and syringe programs (NSPs) are key public health and HIV prevention programs. We sought to compare over time the quality of relationships between NSPs and police, and implementation of best practices. We conducted cross-sectional surveys in 2008 ( n = 32) and 2015 ( n = 28) with NSP managers in Ontario, Canada. Participants were recruited via e-mail to complete an online survey. Over the period studied, self-reported quality of NSP-police relationships did not change-roughly two thirds of NSP managers reported a positive/mostly positive relationship. In 2015, higher proportions of programs offered training to police about the following: the purpose and goals of NSPs (48% vs. 41% in 2008), NSP effectiveness (55% vs. 34%), the health and social concerns of people who use drugs (52% vs. 40%), and needlestick injury prevention (44% vs. 31%). Few managers reported formal conflict resolution procedures with the police (22% in 2015, 9% in 2008). Our findings show that NSP-police relationships did not deteriorate during a time when such programs fell into disfavor with the federal government. More research is needed to understand if and when formal versus informal agreements with police serve the needs of NSPs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".