A measured response? Examining the use of specialty resources and tactics adopted by tactical officers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of tactical officers, commonly known as Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT), has become a contentious issue within contemporary policing. Problematically, most Canadian research has focused on de-contextualized call types (e.g. mental health call, traffic stop) to speak to the use of tactical officers. We move beyond this limitation by conducting a content analysis of incidents that received a response from tactical officers (n = 1652) using operational data from the Winnipeg Police Service. Our results indicate that a pair of tactical officers responded to approximately half of incidents (n = 803) and that the number of responding tactical officers increased when weapons were reported to be involved and when patrol officers requested tactical members to attend the call. Similarly, the use of tactics and other specialty units (e.g. K9) varied depending on the level of risk posed by the incident. Although tactical officers rarely used force (n = 9), most commonly this involved the use of less-lethal options on armed individuals. Taken together, our findings suggest that the use of tactical officers and their tactics are a measured response to risk posed by an incident in an attempt to minimize harm to officers and the public.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it