Badges and guns
The “Ferguson effect”, or too many guns? Exploring violent crime in Chicago
Sherry Towers & Michael White
Significance, April 2017, Pages 26–29
"To sum up, we found no sharp decreases or increases in any of the Chicago crimes related to the timing of the 2014 Ferguson riots. In fact, murders and assaults involving firearms in Chicago began an upward trend well before Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. We also found that violent crimes committed without firearms show similar temporal trends compared to property crimes, but violent crimes involving firearms show distinctly different temporal patterns. In short, there is little statistical evidence of a Ferguson effect on crime and violence in Chicago. However, we found a significant association between the proliferation of firearms in Chicago (using our proxy measures of gun availability) and patterns in firearm-related violent crime. The results here support Commissioner Bratton’s argument that spikes in violent crime in Chicago may be explained by the availability of firearms in the city. While correlation never implies causation, it is compelling that when our model that includes firearm proliferation is trained on a data set from one region in Chicago, it is able to predict the trends in data from another, geographically disparate region. In addition, both our proxies for firearm proliferation were derived from data that largely had nothing to do with assaults or murders."
Early Intervention Systems: Predicting Adverse Interactions Between Police and the Public
Jennifer Helsby et al.
Criminal Justice Policy Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Adverse interactions between police and the public hurt police legitimacy, cause harm to both officers and the public, and result in costly litigation. Early intervention systems (EISs) that flag officers considered most likely to be involved in one of these adverse events are an important tool for police supervision and for targeting interventions such as counseling or training. However, the EISs that exist are not data-driven and based on supervisor intuition. We have developed a data-driven EIS that uses a diverse set of data sources from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and machine learning techniques to more accurately predict the officers who will have an adverse event. Our approach is able to significantly improve accuracy compared with their existing EIS: Preliminary results indicate a 20% reduction in false positives and a 75% increase in true positives.
The effectiveness of prison for reducing drug offender recidivism: A regression discontinuity analysis
Ojmarrh Mitchell et al.
Journal of Experimental Criminology, March 2017, Pages 1–27
Methods: Regression discontinuity analyses are used. These minimize potential selection bias by exogenously assigning cases to conditions based on a rating variable and a cut-off score.
Results: Results indicate that prison has no effect on drug offenders’ rates of reconviction. This finding holds across a range of offender subgroups (racial and ethnic, gender, age, and prior criminal justice system involvement).
Conclusions: Imprisoning individuals convicted of marginally serious drug offenses — that is, those close to a cut-off score for being sent to prison — did not reduce subsequent offending. This finding suggests that curtailing the use of imprisonment for such individuals will not appreciably affect future criminal activity and may have the benefit of reducing correctional system costs.
Should Repeat Offenders Be Punished More Severely for Their Crimes?
Stewart D’Alessio & Lisa Stolzenberg
Criminal Justice Policy Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Debate persists as to the amount of influence criminal history should have in determining the severity of imposed legal sanction for a criminal offense. One position maintains that the punishment for repeat and first-time offenders convicted for the same type of offense should be similar, whereas an alternative viewpoint argues that the state should sanction repeat offenders more harshly. We contribute to this discourse by investigating whether the amount of weight given to an offender’s prior criminal record in sentencing affects the likelihood of repeat offending. Although initial findings showed that a substantive negative bivariate relationship existed at the county level between the weight-accorded prior criminal record in sentencing and repeat offending, this association disappeared in a more sophisticated nonlinear multilevel analysis. Our findings suggest that sanctioning repeat offenders more harshly than first-time offenders for similar offenses has little effect on attenuating repeat offending once other factors are controlled.
Do Community Engagement Efforts Reduce Extremist Rhetoric on Social Media?
Tamar Mitts
Columbia University Working Paper, March 2017
Abstract:
Over the past few years, efforts at countering violent extremism (CVE) have increased around the world. In the United States, much of the focus has been on community engagement -- programs aiming to reduce radicalization by empowering local communities to identify warning signs of extremism before individuals engage in violence. The emphasis on community engagement is rooted in the idea that local knowledge held by families, neighbors, and friends is crucial for countering radicalization. Understanding whether engaging communities is effective is of paramount importance, especially with the rising accessibility of extremist materials on the Internet and social media. However, to date, there has been little systematic study of the effectiveness of community engagement programs in reducing radicalization in the United States. This paper uses new geo-located data on the online behavior of Islamic State supporters and their followers on Twitter, along with information on community engagement activities held by the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties during the Obama Administration from 2014 to 2016, to examine whether community engagement events are associated with reductions in pro-ISIS content on Twitter in these localities. The findings show that community engagement activities are followed by a decrease in online pro-ISIS rhetoric, especially in areas that have held a large number of these events.
Dynamics in Gun Ownership and Crime – Evidence from the Aftermath of Sandy Hook
Christoph Koenig & David Schindler
University of Munich Working Paper, December 2016
Abstract:
Gun rights activists in the United States frequently argue that the right to bear arms, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment, can help deter crime. Advocates of gun control usually respond that firearm prevalence contributes positively to violent crime rates. In this paper, we provide quasi-experimental evidence that a positive and unexpected gun demand shock led to an increase in murder rates. We show that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, and the resulting gun control debate, created additional interest in gun ownership. In states where purchases were delayed due to mandatory waiting periods and bureaucratic hurdles in issuing a gun permit, firearm sales exhibited weaker increases than in states without any such delays. States that, as a result, saw more gun sales also experienced significantly higher murder rates in the months following the demand shock, as murders increased by almost 15% over the course of a year. Our findings survive several robustness checks, and are not driven by differential pre-trends. We also show that women were relatively more likely to become murder victims than men as a result of the shock. Our estimates predict that implementing delays for firearm purchases in all states could have prevented approximately 98 murders in each month of 2013 alone.
Cities and the larger context: What explains changing levels of crime?
John Hipp & Kevin Kane
Journal of Criminal Justice, March–April 2017, Pages 32–44
Abstract:
This study explores whether the broader context in which a city is located impacts the change in crime levels over the subsequent decade. This study uses a wide range of cities (those with a population of at least 10,000), over a long period of time (from 1970 to 2010). We test and find that although cities with larger population and those surrounded by a county with a larger population typically experience larger increases in crime over the subsequent decade, cities experiencing an increase in population during the current decade experience crime decreases. The study finds that cities with higher average income experience greater subsequent crime decreases, and those surrounded by counties with larger unemployment increases experience crime increases. Higher levels of income inequality and racial/ethnic heterogeneity are associated with increasing crime rates, and increasing inequality and racial/ethnic heterogeneity in the surrounding county are associated with further increases. Furthermore, this relationship has strengthened since 1970, suggesting that both scales of inequality are even more important from a public safety perspective. Finally, we tested the time invariance of these relationships, and showed that the magnitude of the relationship between city-level inequality and increasing crime has increased over the study period.
Why Do Kids Get into Trouble on School Days?
Stephen Billings & David Phillips
Regional Science and Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous literature highlights a robust relationship between schools and longer term criminal outcomes. The research presented here examines the short term effects of school being in-session on crime. We begin by confirming the findings of Jacob & Lefgren (2003) that teacher in-service days lead to a reduction in violent crime, consistent with a role for social interactions in school. We extend this result by showing that schools populated with more high crime risk students have larger decreases in crime on teacher in-service days but that this effect is reversed for schools with mostly low crime risk students. These results provide evidence that concentrating high crime risk students into particular schools increases local crime.
Assessing the Effects of Exposure to Supermax Confinement on Offender Postrelease Behaviors
Daniel Butler et al.
Prison Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
A number of studies have examined whether the carceral experience has a criminogenic, deterrent, or null effect on offenders’ postrelease behaviors, but it is less clear whether exposure to different types of confinement similarly affects offenders’ postrelease behaviors. Using data collected from offenders released under postrelease supervision in Ohio, we examine the impact of exposure to one type of penal environment, supermax confinement, on offenders’ odds of recidivism and other postrelease outcomes. The findings revealed that exposure to supermax confinement had no impact on offenders’ postrelease behaviors.
Occupational Safety in the Age of the Opioid Crisis: Needle Stick Injury among Baltimore Police
Javier Cepeda et al.
Journal of Urban Health, February 2017, Pages 100–103
Abstract:
At a time of resurgence in injection drug use and injection-attributable infections, needle stick injury (NSI) risk and its correlates among police remain understudied. In the context of occupational safety training, a convenience sample of 771 Baltimore city police officers responded to a self-administered survey. Domains included NSI experience, protective behaviors, and attitudes towards syringe exchange programs. Sixty officers (8%) reported lifetime NSI. Officers identifying as Latino or other race were almost three times more likely (aOR 2.58, 95% CI 1.12–5.96) to have experienced NSI compared to whites, after adjusting for potential confounders. Findings highlight disparate burdens of NSIs among officers of color, elevating risk of hepatitis, HIV, and trauma. Training, equipment, and other measures to improve occupational safety are critical to attracting and safeguarding police, especially minority officers.
Perceived Sanction Threats and Projective Risk Sensitivity: Auto Theft, Carjacking, and the Channeling Effect
Bruce Jacobs & Michael Cherbonneau
Justice Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although sanction threats promote fear, among committed offenders, that fear can become a resource with which to sculpt emerging crime preferences. In such cases, criminality is not deterred but channeled. We explore the channeling process here as it relates to auto theft and carjacking. Our qualitative findings reveal that auto thieves are reluctant to embrace the violence of carjacking due to concerns over sanction threat severity they attributed to carjacking — both formal (higher sentences) and informal (victim resistance and retaliation). Meanwhile, the carjackers are reticent to enact auto theft because of the more uncertain and putatively greater risk of being surprised by victims, a fear that appears to overcome the enhanced long-term formal penalty of taking a vehicle by force. We examine the implications of offenders’ decision-making for the analytic intersection of rational choice and deterrence, offering the notion of projective risk sensitivity to encapsulate the process.
The body-worn camera perspective bias
Rémi Boivin et al.
Journal of Experimental Criminology, March 2017, Pages 125–142
Objectives: Footage from body-worn cameras (BWCs) is sometimes used to assess the quality of police interventions. This study investigates whether there is a “body-worn camera perspective bias,” in which the point of view provided by the footage influences perception of an intervention.
Methods: Participants with different backgrounds (undergraduate students and police candidates) were randomly allocated to a group that looked at one of two videos showing a fictional police intervention during which lethal force was used against a subject; both videos showed exactly the same intervention, but one had been filmed with a BWC and the other with a surveillance camera installed in a top corner of the room. Participants were then asked to rate the appropriateness of the intervention.
Results: No camera perspective bias was found among university respondents. However a significant camera perspective bias was found among police candidates: respondents’ opinions on the appropriateness of the intervention were significantly different when the film was from the body-worn camera than when it was seen from the surveillance camera. This result may be explained by the finding that viewers of the BWC footage reported that the subject was further from the officer.
Conclusions: Results suggest that the more training individuals have in analyzing police interventions, the more affected they will be by the camera perspective in these interventions. One implication of these results is that the perspective of people assigned and trained to evaluate the appropriateness of an intervention (e.g., members of a committee monitoring police misconduct) might be biased if only video footage from a BWC is presented.
An Analysis of the Deterrent Effects of Disciplinary Segregation on Institutional Rule Violation Rates
Joseph Lucas & Matthew Jones
Criminal Justice Policy Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In light of the limited resources available in the criminal justice system, and given the financial costs and inmate mental health risks associated with disciplinary segregation, the practice warrants testing and evaluation. Limited research exists on the effect disciplinary segregation has on subsequent inmate misconduct in state prisons. Institutional violation rates for a cohort of male inmates incarcerated by the Oregon Department of Corrections were analyzed. Controlling for other factors, the results of this study indicate that disciplinary segregation was not a significant predictor of subsequent institutional misconduct. The findings also indicate that the experience of disciplinary segregation does not reduce subsequent prison inmate misconduct and therefore suggest that it may not be an effective institutional practice. These results signal that disciplinary segregation should be used in a more judicious and informed manner and that further research should be performed to determine whether disciplinary segregation has a general deterrent effect.
Reducing Crime through Expungements
Murat Mungan
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, May 2017, Pages 398–409
Abstract:
Expungement refers to the legal practice of having one's criminal record sealed. These legal devices lower the visibility of a person's criminal record, and thereby reduce the informal sanctions that may be imposed on him. This reduction is enjoyed by the ex-convict only if he does not become a repeat offender, because otherwise he re-obtains a criminal record. Thus, the value a person attaches to having his record expunged is inversely related to his criminal tendency. Therefore, by making expungements costly, the criminal justice system can sort out low criminal tendency individuals – who are unlikely to recidivate – from people who have high criminal tendencies. Moreover, the availability of expungements does not substantially affect a first time offender's incentive to commit crime, because one incurs a cost close to the reduction in informal sanctions that he enjoys by sealing his criminal record. On the other hand, expungements increase specific deterrence, because a person who has no visible record suffers informal sanctions if he is convicted a second time. Thus, perhaps counter-intuitively, allowing ex-convicts to seal their records at substantial costs reduces crime.
Gradual escalation of use-of-force reduces police officer injury
Katelyn Jetelina, Jennifer Reingle Gonzalez & Stephen Bishopp
Injury Prevention, forthcoming
Objective: To examine how escalation through the force continuum predicts officer injury in the presence of citizen aggression, while controlling for extraneous factors, like citizen and officer characteristics.
Methods: Cross-sectional data were extracted from 2244 use-of-force reports from the Dallas Police Department in 2015. Multilevel, mixed logistic regression models were used to evaluate the relationship between use of force and officer injury. Multilevel path analysis tested indirect and direct relationships between citizen aggression and officer injury.
Results: Results suggest that gradual escalation through the force continuum significantly decreases officer injury when a citizen is actively aggressive (β=−1.06, p value <0.001). Further, non-Hispanic black officers (β=−0.22, p value <0.001) and Hispanic officers (β=−0.08, p value <0.05) are less likely to gradually escalate through the force continuum, due to lower odds of verbal commands (black: OR=0.51, 95% CI 0.39 to 0.68; Hispanic: OR=0.77, 95% CI 0.60 to 0.99) and hard-empty hand control (black: OR=0.58, 95% CI 0.43 to 0.77) compared with white officers. Finally, officers with higher tenure (β=−0.01, p value <0.001) are less likely to gradually escalate through the force continuum.
Florida’s task force approach to combat human trafficking: An analysis of county-level data
Lin Huff-Corzine et al.
Police Practice and Research, May/June 2017, Pages 245-258
Abstract:
Since emerging in the USA during the 1990s, the multi-agency task force has become the preferred organizational structure for enforcing human trafficking laws and providing assistance to victims. These task forces often work across county lines and typically include law enforcement agencies, as well as social service and non-governmental organizations. The effect of collaborations with other types of agencies on law enforcement’s human trafficking arrests is unknown. County-level arrest data for human trafficking first became available through the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2014. In this paper, we present findings from county-level analyses with human trafficking arrests in the State of Florida as the dependent variable. Independent variables include the presence of a task force, sociodemographic characteristics, tourism measures, and police officers per capita. The strongest predictor of human trafficking arrests is the presence of a task force.
Juvenile Waiver as a Mechanism of Social Stratification: A Focus on Human Capital
Megan Bears Augustyn & Thomas Loughran
Criminology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The historic transformations of the criminal justice system must be justified and interpreted through the effects on criminals (Maruna and Immarigeon, 2011). The push for harsher sentencing policies for juvenile offenders specifically through the use of juvenile waiver to criminal court is one such policy that is not well understood in terms of its effects on offenders, especially in terms of broader outcomes beyond recidivism. We use data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, which consists of a sample of adolescent offenders followed for 7 years postadjudication, to investigate the effect juvenile waiver has on human capital acquisition and yield among 557 adolescents from Maricopa County, Arizona. By using various matching specifications, our findings demonstrate that juveniles transferred to adult court experience no deleterious effects on human capital in terms of educational acquisition compared with similar youth retained in the juvenile system, yet they still earn considerably less income 7 years postadjudication. These results suggest that an important and unintended collateral consequence of juvenile waiver is an increase in social stratification potentially through labeling and labor market discrimination.
Age, Risk Assessment, and Sanctioning: Overestimating the Old, Underestimating the Young
John Monahan, Jennifer Skeem & Christopher Lowenkamp
Law and Human Behavior, April 2017, Pages 191-201
Abstract:
While many extoll the potential contribution of risk assessment to reducing the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration without increasing crime, others adamantly oppose the incorporation of risk assessment in sanctioning. The principal concern is that any benefits in terms of reduced rates of incarceration achieved through the use of risk assessment will be offset by costs to social justice — which are claimed to be inherent in any risk assessment process that relies on variables for which offenders bear no responsibility, such as race, gender, and age. Previous research has addressed the variables of race and gender. Here, based on a sample of 7,350 federal offenders, we empirically test the predictive fairness of an instrument — the Post Conviction Risk Assessment (PCRA) — that includes the variable of age. We found that the strength of association between PCRA scores and future arrests was similar across younger (i.e., 25 years and younger), middle (i.e., 26–40 years), and older (i.e., 41 years and older) age groups (AUC values .70 or higher). Nevertheless, rates of arrest within each PCRA risk category were consistently lower for older than for younger offenders. Despite its inclusion of age as a risk factor, PCRA scores overestimated rates of recidivism for older offenders and underestimated rates of recidivism for younger offenders.