Crime waves
Joscha Legewie
American Journal of Sociology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Racial profiling and the disproportionate use of police force are controversial political issues. I argue that racial bias in the use of force increases after relevant events such as the shooting of a police officer by a black suspect. To examine this argument, I design a quasi experiment using data from 3.9 million time and geocoded pedestrian stops in New York City. The findings show that two fatal shootings of police officers by black suspects increased the use of police force against blacks substantially in the days after the shootings. The use of force against whites and Hispanics, however, remained unchanged, and there is no evidence for an effect of two other police murders by a white and Hispanic suspect. Aside from the importance for the debate on racial profiling and police use of force, this research reveals a general set of processes where events create intergroup conflict, foreground stereotypes, and trigger discriminatory responses.
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The Effects of DNA Databases on Crime
Jennifer Doleac
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Every U.S. state has a database of criminal offenders’ DNA profiles. These databases receive widespread attention in the media and popular culture, but there has been no rigorous analysis of their impact on crime. This paper intends to fill that gap. I exploit the details and timing of state DNA database expansions in two ways, first to address the effects of DNA profiling on individuals’ subsequent criminal behavior and then to address the aggregate effects on crime rates. I show that DNA databases deter crime by profiled offenders, reduce crime rates, and are more cost-effective than traditional law enforcement tools.
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An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force
Roland Fryer
NBER Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.
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Sensitivity to the Ferguson Effect: The role of managerial organizational justice
Justin Nix & Scott Wolfe
Journal of Criminal Justice, December 2016, Pages 12–20
Purpose: We argue that the police have been adversely impacted by Ferguson-related negative publicity in ways beyond the supposed increase in crime (e.g., reduced motivation and increased perception of danger). Further, we suggest that organizational justice is a key factor that influences officers' sensitivity to such Ferguson Effects.
Methods: We used a sample of 510 sheriff's deputies surveyed 6 months after the incident in Ferguson. We explored whether organizational justice is associated with deputies' sensitivity to several manifestations of the Ferguson Effect using OLS and ordered logistic regression models.
Results: The results demonstrated that deputies who believed their supervisors were more organizationally fair were less likely to feel unmotivated, perceive more danger, believe their colleagues have been negatively impacted, or feel that US citizens and local residents have become more cynical toward the police in the post-Ferguson era.
Conclusions: Police supervisors who use organizational justice as a guiding managerial philosophy are more likely to shield their officers from the negative work-related outcomes that can follow recent Ferguson-type publicity. Supervisors should be fair, objective, honest, and respectful when dealing with their subordinates in order to communicate that the agency has their back even when it may appear the community does not.
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Spatial Dimensions of the Effect of Neighborhood Disadvantage on Delinquency
Matt Vogel & Scott South
Criminology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research examining the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and adolescent offending typically examines only the influence of residential neighborhoods. This strategy may be problematic as 1) neighborhoods are rarely spatially independent of each other and 2) adolescents spend an appreciable portion of their time engaged in activities outside of their immediate neighborhood. Therefore, characteristics of neighborhoods outside of, but geographically proximate to, residential neighborhoods may affect adolescents’ propensity to engage in delinquent behavior. We append a spatially lagged, distance-weighted measure of socioeconomic disadvantage in “extralocal” neighborhoods to the individual records of respondents participating in the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (N = 6,491). Results from negative binomial regression analyses indicate that the level of socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods is inversely associated with youth offending, as theories of relative deprivation, structured opportunity, and routine activities would predict, and that the magnitude of this effect rivals that of the level of disadvantage in youths’ own residential neighborhoods. Moreover, socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods suppresses the criminogenic influence of socioeconomic disadvantage in youths’ own neighborhoods, revealing stronger effects of local neighborhood disadvantage than would otherwise be observed.
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Neighborhood Violent Crime and Academic Growth in Chicago: Lasting Effects of Early Exposure
Julia Burdick-Will
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
A large body of research documents the importance of early experiences for later academic, social, and economic success. Exposure to an unsafe neighborhood is no exception. Living in a violent neighborhood can influence the stress levels, protective behaviors, and community interactions of both parents and children in ways that generate cumulative educational disadvantage. Using nine years (2002–2011) of detailed crime data from the Chicago Police Department and longitudinal administrative data from the Chicago Public Schools, I estimate the influence of early exposure to neighborhood violence on growth in standardized test scores over time. Student fixed effects are included to remove any bias due to constant differences between students. The results show that children from more violent neighborhoods fall farther behind their peers from safer neighborhoods as they progress through school. These effects are comparable in size to the independent association with socioeconomic disadvantage and an annual measure of more recent neighborhood violence exposure.
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The Prison Boom and Sentencing Policy
Derek Neal & Armin Rick
Journal of Legal Studies, January 2016, Pages 1-41
Abstract:
The existing literature on the role of changes in sentencing policies as drivers of growth in prison populations contains findings that appear contradictory. We present a new method for characterizing changes in the severity of expected punishments for offenders and build a new simulation model based on this method. We provide clear evidence that changes in sentencing policy drove recent growth in prison populations in the United States, and our approach sheds light on the reasons that some previous studies did not reach this conclusion. The shift to more punitive sentencing policies had a disproportionate effect on black communities, even though, for the most part, this shift did not target blacks or crimes that blacks commit relatively more than whites.
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Janet Warren et al.
Aggression and Violent Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined the characteristics of perpetrator, victim, and crime scene for 463 child abduction incidents involving a single perpetrator and single victim based upon case material submitted to federal law enforcement. The victims were predominantly female with sexual assault being the primary motivation for the abduction of both the female and male victims. Within this sample 55% of the female child victims and 49% of the male child victims were found dead or not recovered. Offenders who were identified as being criminally versatile were found more often to abduct the youngest and oldest children, to be between the ages of 30 to 59, and a stranger to their victim. In contrast, perpetrators with prior crimes against children tended more often to be below the age of 30 years, to demonstrate more of a propensity for abducting children of minority status, and to perpetrate crimes with a lower probability of holding their victims for more than 8 h. Only 5% of offenders who abducted a female child and none of the perpetrators who abducted male child victims during or after 1994 were found to be registered on a state or federal sex offender registry.
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The Effects of Local Police Surges on Crime and Arrests in New York City
John MacDonald, Jeffrey Fagan & Amanda Geller
PLoS ONE, June 2016
Abstract:
The New York Police Department (NYPD) under Operation Impact deployed extra police officers to high crime areas designated as impact zones. Officers were encouraged to conduct investigative stops in these areas. City officials credited the program as one of the leading causes of New York City’s low crime rate. We tested the effects of Operation Impact on reported crimes and arrests from 2004 to 2012 using a difference-in-differences approach. We used Poisson regression models to compare differences in crime and arrest counts before and after census block groups were designated as impact zones compared to census block groups in the same NYPD precincts but outside impact zones. Impact zones were significantly associated with reductions in total reported crimes, assaults, burglaries, drug violations, misdemeanor crimes, felony property crimes, robberies, and felony violent crimes. Impact zones were significantly associated with increases in total reported arrests, arrests for burglary, arrests for weapons, arrests for misdemeanor crimes, and arrests for property felony crimes. Impact zones were also significantly associated with increases in investigative stops for suspected crimes, but only the increase in stops made based on probable cause indicators of criminal behaviors were associated with crime reductions. The largest increase in investigative stops in impact zones was based on indicators of suspicious behavior that had no measurable effect on crime. The findings suggest that saturating high crime blocks with police helped reduce crime in New York City, but that the bulk of the investigative stops did not play an important role in the crime reductions. The findings indicate that crime reduction can be achieved with more focused investigative stops.
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Perils of police action: A cautionary tale from US data sets
Ted Miller et al.
Injury Prevention, forthcoming
Population: Those injured during US legal police intervention as recorded in 2012 Vital Statistics mortality census, 2012 Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project nationwide inpatient and emergency department samples, and two 2015 newspaper censuses of deaths.
Exposure: 2012 and 2014 arrests from Federal Bureau of Investigation data adjusted for non-reporting jurisdictions; street stops and traffic stops that involved vehicle or occupant searches, without arrest, from the 2011 Police Public Contact Survey (PPCS), with the percentage breakdown by race computed from pooled 2005, 2008 and 2011 PPCS surveys due to small case counts.
Results: US police killed or injured an estimated 55 400 people in 2012 (95% CI 47 050 to 63 740 for cases coded as police involved). Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics had higher stop/arrest rates per 10 000 population than white non-Hispanics and Asians. On average, an estimated 1 in 291 stops/arrests resulted in hospital-treated injury or death of a suspect or bystander. Ratios of admitted and fatal injury due to legal police intervention per 10 000 stops/arrests did not differ significantly between racial/ethnic groups. Ratios rose with age, and were higher for men than women.
Conclusions: Healthcare administrative data sets can inform public debate about injuries resulting from legal police intervention. Excess per capita death rates among blacks and youth at police hands are reflections of excess exposure.
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Jeffrey Swanson et al.
Health Affairs, June 2016, Pages 1067-1075
Abstract:
Gun violence kills about ninety people every day in the United States, a toll measured in wasted and ruined lives and with an annual economic price tag exceeding $200 billion. Some policy makers suggest that reforming mental health care systems and improving point-of-purchase background checks to keep guns from mentally disturbed people will address the problem. Epidemiological research shows that serious mental illness contributes little to the risk of interpersonal violence but is a strong factor in suicide, which accounts for most firearm fatalities. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of gun restrictions focused on mental illness remains poorly understood. This article examines gun-related suicide and violent crime in people with serious mental illnesses, and whether legal restrictions on firearm sales to people with a history of mental health adjudication are effective in preventing gun violence. Among the study population in two large Florida counties, we found that 62 percent of violent gun crime arrests and 28 percent of gun suicides involved individuals not legally permitted to have a gun at the time. Suggested policy reforms include enacting risk-based gun removal laws and prohibiting guns from people involuntarily detained in short-term psychiatric hospitalizations.
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Race and State in City Police Spending Growth: 1980 to 2010
Robert Vargas & Philip McHarris
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, forthcoming
Abstract:
What has driven city police spending growth in large cities? Studies show that racial threat is an important predictor, but scholars overlook how cities can afford spending increases during hard financial times. Research suggests that federal grants through the 1994 Clinton crime bill and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security play important roles. In this article, the authors ask whether racial threat and federal aid had an interrelated role in city police spending from 1980 to 2010. Using a unique data set on 88 large cities, the authors find that Clinton crime bill grants were associated with city police spending, especially in cities with growing Black populations. The authors also find that from 2000 to 2010, overall federal aid was associated with city police spending, especially in cities with growing foreign-born populations. This study shows that the state, through relationships between federal and local government, has been a critical missing component in the process whereby racial threat shapes local police spending.
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Homogeneity and Inequality: School Discipline Inequality and the Role of Racial Composition
Linsey Edwards
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research consistently demonstrates that black students are disproportionately subject to behavioral sanctions, yet little is known about contextual variation. This paper explores the relationship between school racial composition and racial inequality in discipline. Prior work suggests that demographic composition predicts harsh punishment of minorities. Accordingly, a threat framework suggests that increases in black student enrollment correspond to increases in punitive school policies. Results from this paper find some support for this hypothesis, finding that the percent of black students in a school is related to increased odds of suspension/expulsion, and differential effects of behavior partially mediate these relationships. However, I also find that a traditional threat narrative may be insufficient. Black students may be most likely to experience unequal sanctions on their behavior in racially homogeneous contexts — whether homogeneously black or white. These results suggest that more research is needed to understand how the social organization of schools contributes to discipline inequality.
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Likelihood-Based Inference and Prediction in Spatio-Temporal Panel Count Models for Urban Crimes
Roman Liesenfeld, Jean-François Richard & Jan Vogler
Journal of Applied Econometrics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop a panel count model with a latent spatio-temporal heterogeneous state process for monthly severe crimes at the census-tract level in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our dataset combines Uniform Crime Reporting data with socio-economic data. The likelihood is estimated by efficient importance sampling techniques for high-dimensional spatial models. Estimation results confirm the broken-windows hypothesis whereby less severe crimes are leading indicators for severe crimes. In addition to ML parameter estimates, we compute several other statistics of interest for law enforcement such as spatio-temporal elasticities of severe crimes with respect to less severe crimes, out-of-sample forecasts, predictive distributions and validation test statistics.
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Does Gun Control Reduce Violent Crime?
Gary Kleck, Tomislav Victor Kovandzic & Jon Bellows
Florida State University Working Paper, June 2016
Abstract:
Do gun control laws reduce violence? To answer this question, a city-level cross-sectional analysis was performed on data pertaining to every U.S. city with a population of at least 25,000 in 1990 (n=1,078), assessing the impact of 19 major types of gun control laws, and controlling for gun ownership levels and numerous other possible confounders. Models were estimated using instrumental variables regression to address endogeneity of gun levels due to reverse causality. Results indicate that gun control laws generally show no evidence of effects on crime rates, possibly because gun levels do not have a net positive effect on violence rates. Although a minority of laws seem to show effects, they are as likely to imply violence-increasing effects as violence-decreasing effects. There were, however, a few noteworthy exceptions: requiring a license to possess a gun, and bans on purchases of guns by alcoholics appear to reduce rates of both homicide and robbery. Weaker evidence suggests that bans on gun purchases by criminals and on possession by mentally ill persons may reduce assault rates, and that bans on gun purchase by criminals may also reduce robbery rates.
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New Evidence on the Impact of Concealed Carry Weapon Laws on Crime
Mehdi Barati
International Review of Law and Economics, August 2016, Pages 76–83
Abstract:
For more than a decade, there has been an academic debate over the deterrence effect of concealed carry weapon (shall issue) laws. However, all previous studies do not consider the types of gun-carry laws in place prior to the adoption of the “shall issue” laws. Using difference-in-difference methodology, findings of this study imply that considering the type of regulations that states had prior to passing “shall issue” laws matters and that “shall issue” laws do have a deterrence effect under certain circumstances. Adopting “shall issue” laws only reduces the crime rate in states with “no issue” laws in place, and “shall issue” laws are redundant to “may issue” (restricted concealed carry) laws in terms of crime reduction.
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Escapes From Correctional Custody: A New Examination of an Old Phenomenon
Bryce Elling Peterson, Adam Fera & Jeff Mellow
Prison Journal, September 2016, Pages 511-533
Abstract:
Despite a shared interest in escapes from correctional custody by policy makers, facility administrators, media, and the public, there is a dearth of empirical research on this event. Our study synthesizes prior research, distinguishing between inmate-, incident-, and facility-level variables. We introduce the Correctional Incident Database, which employs a novel approach for collecting escape data. Finally, we describe a sample of 611 inmates involved in 503 escape incidents from 398 facilities. Our findings indicate that escapes from jail are a frequent, yet overlooked, phenomenon. The results also challenge the (mis)perception that escapes are often sensational and violent events.
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Crime-Reduction Effects of Open-street CCTV: Conditionality Considerations
Hyungjin Lim & Pamela Wilcox
Justice Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study addresses the conditional nature of the effectiveness of open-street CCTV (closed circuit television) by examining the differences in the effects (1) between daytime and nighttime crime, (2) between weekday and weekend crime, (3) across specific-crime offenses, and (4) depending on CCTV site characteristics, including location type (e.g. downtown, business district, school/university, or residential area) and the site’s base rate of crime. This study used HLM (hierarchical linear modeling) with 84 repeated measures across 34 camera locations in Cincinnati, Ohio, while also accounting for overlapping camera areas. Overall, the findings provided minimal evidence of the effectiveness of CCTV in reducing crime, though some types of crime were reduced in residential areas especially, and effectiveness was clearly interdependent with an area’s base rate of crime. Finally, WDQ analyses showed that diffusion of benefits occurred much more often than displacement in cases where there was a crime reduction, post-CCTV.
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Fewer vacants, fewer crimes? Impacts of neighborhood revitalization policies on crime
Jonathan Spader, Jenny Schuetz & Alvaro Cortes
Regional Science and Urban Economics, September 2016, Pages 73–84
Abstract:
The relationship between neighborhood physical environment and social disorder, particularly crime, is of critical interest to urban economists and sociologists, as well as local governments. Over the past 50 years, various policy interventions to improve physical conditions in distressed neighborhoods have also been heralded for their potential to reduce crime. Urban renewal programs in the mid-20th century and public housing redevelopment in the 1990s both subscribed to the idea that signs of physical disorder invite social disorder. More recently, the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) provided funding for local policymakers to rehabilitate or demolish foreclosed and vacant properties, in order to mitigate negative spillovers — including crime — on surrounding neighborhoods. In this paper, we investigate the impact of NSP investments on localized crime patterns in Cleveland, Chicago and Denver. Results suggest that demolition activity in Cleveland decreased burglary and theft, but do not find measurable impacts of property rehabilitation investments — although the precision of these estimates are limited by the number of rehabilitation activities.
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Jason Stopyra et al.
Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, October 2016, Pages 48–52
Introduction: Despite research demonstrating the overall safety of Conducted Electrical Weapons (CEWs), commonly known by the brand name TASER®, concerns remain regarding cardiac safety. The addition of cardiac biomonitoring capability to a CEW could prove useful and even lifesaving in the rare event of a medical crisis by detecting and analyzing cardiac rhythms during the period immediately after CEW discharge.
Objective: To combine an electrocardiogram (ECG) device with a CEW to detect and store ECG signals while still allowing the CEW to perform its primary function of delivering an incapacitating electrical discharge.
Methods: This work was performed in three phases. In Phase 1 standard law enforcement issue CEW cartridges were modified to demonstrate transmission of ECG signals. In Phase 2, a miniaturized ECG recorder was combined with a standard issue CEW and tested. In Phase 3, a prototype CEW with on-board cardiac biomonitoring was tested on human volunteers to assess its ability to perform its primary function of electrical incapacitation.
Results: Bench testing demonstrated that slightly modified CEW cartridge wires transmitted simulated ECG signals produced by an ECG rhythm generator and from a human volunteer. Ultimately, a modified CEW incorporating ECG monitoring successfully delivered incapacitating current to human volunteers and successfully recorded ECG signals from subcutaneous CEW probes after firing.
Conclusion: An ECG recording device was successfully incorporated into a standard issue CEW without impeding the functioning of the device. This serves as proof-of-concept that safety measures such as cardiac biomonitoring can be incorporated into CEWs and possibly other law enforcement devices.
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White fear, dehumanization, and low empathy: Lethal combinations for shooting biases
Yara Mekawi, Konrad Bresin & Carla Hunter
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, July 2016, Pages 322-332
Method: Participants (N = 290) completed a dehumanization implicit association test and simulated shooting task, then reported their fear of racial minorities (i.e., White fear) and empathic ability.
Results: We found that (a) individuals high in White fear showed a shooting bias, such that they had a lower threshold for shooting Black relative to White and East Asian targets, (b) Dehumanization moderated the White fear and shooting bias relation, such that individuals high in White fear and high in dehumanization had a significantly more liberal shooting threshold for Black versus White targets, and (c) Empathy moderated the White fear and shooting bias relation, such that people who were high in White fear and low in empathic ability had a more liberal shooting threshold for Black versus White targets. In sum, fearing racial/ethnic minorities can have devastating shooting bias outcomes for Black individuals, but this effect is stronger when people also dehumanize Black individuals, and weaker when people have high empathy.
Conclusions: These findings contribute to the literature by identifying theory driven moderators that identify both risk and protective factors in predicting racial shooting biases.
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Race, Ethnicity, Risky Lifestyles, and Violent Victimization: A Test of a Mediation Model
Arelys Madero-Hernandez & Bonnie Fisher
Race and Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Empirical studies have established that Blacks and Hispanics are two of the most violently victimized racial/ethnic groups in the United States, but the mechanisms that underlie these disparities in victimization risk are not well understood. This study tests a mediation model developed from criminal opportunity theories that may explain the disparities. Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the results show that Black and Hispanic adolescents were twice as likely as their White counterparts to be violently victimized, and these disparities remained after controlling for demographic characteristics and prior victimization. As to the hypothesized sources of these disparities, there was mixed evidence regarding the mediation model. Although risky lifestyles were significantly related to violent victimization and eliminated all disparities between Black and White youth, they failed to eliminate victimization disparities between Hispanics and White youth. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of theory and victimization prevention.