Skip to Main Content

Criminal Justice: Policing and Law Enforcement

Searching Tips and Tricks

These days most contemporary government documents are online, and increasingly many historical ones are as well. In addition to searching library catalogs such as the WSU Libraries' Search It catalog, and specific government databases (i.e. govinfo), you may find it of use to use Google's Advanced Serach capabilities.

Here are some examples (these work in Google, Bing, etc.)

Federal government

site:.gov predictive policing (you can put predictive policing in quotation marks to make it more exact)

site:.gov "predictive policing" filetype:.pdf

State government

site:.wa.gov "use of force"

The same is true for nonprofits and research institutes - these often have a .org extension, so... (remember that advocacy organizations and even research institutions can have a specific perspective, or publish multiple perspectives that must be acknowledged)

site:.org "predictive policing" filetype:.pdf

Bureau of Justice Statistics - US Department of Justice

Includes:

WSU Libraries, PO Box 645610, Washington State University, Pullman WA 99164-5610, 509-335-9671, Contact Us