In one of the most ambitious public sector reform experiments in Africa, the Ghana government doubled its police officer salaries in 2010 in part to mitigate petty corruption on its roads. Neighboring countries in the West African region left their police salaries unchanged. Using unique data on bribes paid from over 2,100 truck trips in West Africa and representing over 45,000 bribe opportunit...

While traumatic stress studies have been undertaken in the South African Police Service (SAPS),1,2 there are few data related to traumatic events experienced by policemen of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) – a branch of SAPS concerned with law enforcement on the road. Similar to other disaster workers, these policemen are expected to be at increased risk of acute stress disorder, depressi...

Many published studies that examined the effect of lead exposure on neurobehavioral performances were conducted in confined manufacturing environment with low to moderate blood lead levels as a marker of exposure. This study was conducted in a general environmental setting with very low exposure intensity and blood lead levels. The objective of the study was to determine the effect of very low ...

US physician Martin Duke argues that it served as a badge of protection.* This idea also surfaced in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith: ‘The Doctor, and the Doctor alone, was safe by night in the slum called “the Arbor”. His black bag was a pass. Policemen saluted him, prostitutes bowed to him without mockery, saloon-keepers called out “Evenin’ Doc” and hold-up men stood back in doorways to let...

The attitude of the public toward mental illness and toward psychiatric patients raises a serious and sensitive issue that indirectly affects the development of community mental health services. Most citizens feel that there is an association between mental illness and dangerous or violent behavior. Studies undertaken among police personnel in the 1970s demonstrated that their attitudes were si...