Using the force
Exploring Bias in Police Shooting Decisions With Real Shoot/Don’t Shoot Cases
John Worrall et al.
Crime & Delinquency, forthcoming
Abstract:
The controversy surrounding recent high-profile police shootings (e.g., Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Laquan McDonald in Chicago) has prompted inquiry into the possible existence of bias in officers’ use-of-force decisions. Using a balanced mix of shoot/don’t shoot cases from a large municipal police department in the Southwestern United States, this study analyzed the effect of suspect race on officers’ decisions to shoot — while accounting for other theoretically relevant factors. Findings suggest that Black suspects were not disproportionately the target of police shootings; Black suspects were approximately one third as likely to be shot as other suspects. This finding challenges the current bias narrative and is consistent with the other race-related findings in recently published research.
Did Post-Floyd et al. Reforms Reduce Racial Disparities in NYPD Stop, Question, and Frisk Practices? An Exploratory Analysis Using External and Internal Benchmarks
John MacDonald & Anthony Braga
Justice Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Various methodological approaches to constructing external and internal benchmarks have been applied to estimate racial bias in police stop, question, and frisk (SQF) patterns. We apply an external benchmark of the race of the residential population and an internal benchmark of similarly-situated stops to estimate if racial disparities in New York City SQF data were impacted by the Floyd, et al. v. City of New York court settlement. We find that after the settlement, the racial composition of census tracts were no longer significant predictors of the stop rate after controlling for reported crime, socioeconomic factors, and police precincts. We further find that differences in SQF outcomes and hit rates between Blacks and Hispanics and similarly-situated others diminished substantially after the settlement. These findings suggest that court reforms may be an effective method for reducing racial disparities in SQF patterns.
Race, Gender, and the Contexts of Unarmed Fatal Interactions with Police
Odis Johnson, Keon Gilbert & Habiba Ibrahim
Washington University in St. Louis Working Paper, February 2018
Abstract:
In the post-Ferguson era, public opinion remains divided about the ways that race and gender intersect in relation to law enforcement’s use of lethal force. Addressing this tension within research, we explored race-gender differences in the likelihood of being killed while unarmed. Specifically, we asked: 1) are the odds that black males will be unarmed when killed by police greater than they are for other male racial groups, 2) are the odds that an unarmed fatality has occurred related to the characteristics of the location in which it happened, and/or the agency of the officer(s) responsible, and 3) how might the odds that a women is unarmed when killed by police vary across racial/ethnic groups after considering contextual and agency characteristics? To answer these questions, we identified 1762 fatal interactions with police that occurred over a 20 month time period, and merged them with the nationally representative Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey, Uniform Crime Reports data, and census characteristics. Using hierarchical linear models, we find the odds that black Americans will be killed by police when unarmed are nearly 7 to 1 — more than double the odds found in research to date — and due primarily to the unarmed status of black women. We conclude with a discussion of this study’s implications for policy and future directions for research.
Traffic and crime
Louis-Philippe Beland & Daniel Brent
Journal of Public Economics, April 2018, Pages 96-116
Abstract:
We study the link between crime and extreme traffic congestion to estimate the psychological costs of traffic. Our empirical analysis combines police incident reports with observations of local traffic data in Los Angeles from 2011 to 2015. This rich dataset allows us to link traffic with criminal activity at a fine spatial and temporal dimension. Our identification relies on deviations from normal traffic to isolate the impact of abnormally high traffic on crime. We find that extreme traffic increases the incidence of domestic violence, a crime shown to be affected by emotional cues, but not other crimes. The result is robust to a variety of specifications and falsification tests. The results represent a lower bound of the psychological costs of traffic congestion, since most drivers stuck in traffic do not commit domestic violence but still bear some emotional costs.
Declining trends in drug dealing among adolescents in the United States
Michael Vaughn et al.
Addictive Behaviors, September 2018, Pages 106-109
Methods: Data were collected between 2002 and 2015 as part of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). Participants included 233,435 US youth aged 12–17. The primary variable of interest was self-reported past year drug-selling. Logistic regression assessed trends in drug-selling among male and female subgroups.
Results: Between 2002 and 2015, the prevalence of drug-selling decreased significantly across all youth (AOR = 0.970, p < .001). Analysis of gender differences revealed that the rate of drug-selling decreased significantly among boys (AOR = 0.962, p < .001), however, the trend remained stable for girls (AOR = 0.987, p > .05). The decrease in drug-selling was observed for nearly all male subgroups, African-American girls (0.946, p < .01) and girls reporting no illegal substance use in the past year (0.960, p < .05).
Public Support for the Punishment of Police Use of Force Errors: Evidence of Ideological Divergence and Convergence
Shefali Patil
Police Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is widely believed that the public is ideologically divided with regard to law enforcement. Drawing on omission bias research, I challenge this assumption, arguing that such polarization is contingent on the type of use of force error officers commit. Three experimental studies demonstrate that, regardless of the suspect’s race, liberals are more likely than conservatives to punish a false-positive error (e.g., shooting an unarmed suspect), because they attribute responsibility to causes within the officer’s control. However, liberals and conservatives are equally unlikely to support punishing a false-negative error (failing to shoot an armed suspect), regardless of whether the suspect harms a fellow patrol officer or third-party civilian. Furthermore, bipartisan tolerance of false-negative errors is especially high among both liberals and conservatives if the withholding of force was intended to preserve the suspect’s life. Implications for theory and public policy are discussed.
Revisiting a Criminological Classic: The Cycle of Violence
Wesley Myers et al.
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is a growing “replication crisis” in the social and behavioral sciences, where original research across a wide array of substantive areas has failed to replicate when conducted by others. This problem highlights the importance of carefully revisiting original research — particularly studies that have exerted a significant influence over the field. Accordingly, in the present study, we subject Widom’s classic work, “The Cycle of Violence,” to a rigorous empirical reproduction and extension. We subjected her original data to alternative analytic techniques and to different measurement strategies and model specifications. Our results indicated that although we were able to replicate her original results, the link between childhood physical abuse and violence in adulthood failed to survive the robustness checks we conducted. Instead, childhood neglect emerged as the most robust predictor of adult violence.
Birds of a Feather Fight Together: Status-Enhancing Violence, Social Distance and the Emergence of Homogenous Gangs
Jason Gravel et al.
Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2018, Pages 189–219
Objectives: This study proposes a theoretical framework for understanding two empirical findings from gang research: (1) gangs are generally racially homogenous, even in heterogeneous environments, and (2) gang violence tends to be intra-racial. We draw from the extensive literature on street gangs as well as from research on group formation and status-enhancing behavior to develop a theoretical model of gang formation.
Methods: Using game theory, we model the simultaneous decisions of individuals to commit status-enhancing acts of violence and to seek protection by joining a gang. We then conduct computer simulations to examine the resulting patterns of violence and gang composition.
Results: We demonstrate that as long as some social distance exists between racial groups in a community, gang violence will be intra-racial and gangs will be homogenous. We find that our results are robust to a number of simple variations of the model and allow us to generate several hypotheses about the nature of gang formation and patterns of violence.
Conclusions: When violence is motivated by socially constructed rewards, socially closer targets are likely to yield greater rewards. In such a system, individuals must reduce their likelihood of victimization by entering a social contract of non-violence (i.e. gang membership) with individuals who might view them as status-enhancing targets (i.e. socially close individuals). The result is that gangs are made up of socially close individuals interested in attacking other socially close individuals. Therefore, gangs tend to be racially homogenous and violence is overwhelmingly intra-racial.
Racial and Other Sociodemographic Disparities in Terrorism Sting Operations
Jesse Norris & Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research suggests a high prevalence of entrapment in post-9/11 terrorism sting operations, but it is unknown whether entrapment abuses are disproportionately targeted at specific racial/ethnic, religious, or socioeconomic groups. Drawing on Black’s theory of law, symbolic threat theory, and research on stereotypes, cognitive biases, and institutional incentives, the authors hypothesize that government agents and informants will use problematic tactics disproportionately against certain marginalized groups. This study empirically tests for such disparities using detailed data on post-9/11 terrorism prosecutions. Specifically, the authors code the sociodemographic characteristics of the 316 domestic terrorism defendants in cases occurring in the 13 years after 9/11 and involving informants. These data are integrated with an existing database of indicators of entrapment for each defendant. Using multivariable models, the authors test whether sociodemographic characteristics predict four key entrapment-related outcomes. Results indicate that minority racial and religious groups, undocumented immigrants, and individuals with low socioeconomic status all have elevated risk for at least one entrapment-related outcome. Strikingly, the most consistent predictor of entrapment is black Muslim identity. In contrast, white Muslims show no increased risk for entrapment vis-à-vis white non-Muslims for all but one outcome. This study thus documents apparent discrimination against African Americans (and white privilege) in yet another area of the criminal justice system. It also demonstrates that deeply ingrained forms of discrimination may become dominant even in policy fields characterized by intense discrimination against other groups.
Age Gradient in Female Crime: Welfare Reform as a Turning Point
Hope Corman, Dhaval Dave & Nancy Reichman
NBER Working Paper, March 2018
Abstract:
This study explores how a major public policy change — the implementation of welfare reform in the U.S. in the 1990s — shaped the age gradient in female crime. We used FBI arrest data to investigate the age-patterning of the effects of welfare reform on women’s arrests for property crime, the type of crime women are most likely to commit and that welfare reform has been shown to affect. We found that women’s property crime arrest rates declined over the age span; that welfare reform led to an overall reduction in adult women’s property crime arrests of about 4%, with the strongest effects for women ages 25–29 and in their 40s; that the effects were slightly stronger in states with stricter work incentives; and that the effects were much stronger in states with high criminal justice expenditures and staffing. The key contributions of this study are the focus on a broad and relevant policy-based “turning point” (change in circumstances that can lead people to launch or desist from criminal careers), addressing the general question of how a turning point shapes age gradients in criminal behavior, and the focus on women in the context of the age patterning of crime.
The Social Context of Criminal Threat, Victim Race, and Punitive Black and Latino Sentiment
Eric Stewart et al.
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
A well-established body of research focuses on the relationship between criminal threat and the exercise of formal social control, and a largely separate literature examines the effects of victim race in criminal punishment. Despite their close association, few attempts have been made to integrate these related lines of empirical inquiry in the sociology of punishment. In this article, we address this issue by examining relationships among criminal threat, victim race, and punitive sentiment toward black and Latino defendants. We analyze nationally representative survey data that include both subjective and objective measures of criminal threat, and we incorporate unique information on victim/offender dyads to test research questions about the that role victim race plays in the formation of anti-black and anti-Latino sentiment in the criminal justice system. The results indicate that both subjective perceptions of criminal threat and minority population growth are significantly related to punitiveness among whites, and that punitive sentiment is enhanced in situations that involve minority offenders and white victims. Moreover, we show that aggregate indicators of racial threat strongly condition the effect of victim race on punitive attitudes. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to racial group threat theories and current perspectives on the exercise of state-sponsored social control.
Long-Term Effects of the Communities That Care Trial on Substance Use, Antisocial Behavior, and Violence Through Age 21 Years
Sabrina Oesterle et al.
American Journal of Public Health, May 2018, Pages 659-665
Objectives: To evaluate whether the effects of the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system, implemented in early adolescence to promote positive youth development and reduce health-risking behavior, endured through age 21 years.
Methods: We analyzed 9 waves of prospective data collected between 2004 and 2014 from a panel of 4407 participants (grade 5 through age 21 years) in the community-randomized trial of the CTC system in Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Oregon, Utah, and Washington State. We used multilevel models to evaluate intervention effects on sustained abstinence, lifetime incidence, and prevalence of past-year substance use, antisocial behavior, and violence.
Results: The CTC system increased the likelihood of sustained abstinence from gateway drug use by 49% and antisocial behavior by 18%, and reduced lifetime incidence of violence by 11% through age 21 years. In male participants, the CTC system also increased the likelihood of sustained abstinence from tobacco use by 30% and marijuana use by 24%, and reduced lifetime incidence of inhalant use by 18%. No intervention effects were found on past-year prevalence of these behaviors.
Perceptions of the Legal System and Recidivism: Investigating the Mediating Role of Perceptions of Chances for Success in Juvenile Offenders
Anna Abate & Amanda Venta
Criminal Justice and Behavior, April 2018, Pages 541-560
Abstract:
Using a sample of serious juvenile offenders, the current study examined relations between perceptions of the legal system and recidivism, exploring the roles of perceptions of chances for success as a mediator and race/ethnicity as a moderator. The results indicate that in Black and Hispanic juvenile offenders, but not White, perceptions of chances for success mediates the relation between perceptions of the legal system and recidivism. The current study offers support for the notion that interventions aimed at preventing youth from engaging in illegal behaviors may need to be tailored to target racial/ethnic-specific attitudes and foster beliefs in racial/ethnic minority youth that they are capable of future success.
An Application of Machine Learning for Predicting Rearrests: Significant Predictors for Juveniles
Yoshiko Takahashi & Len Evans
Race and Social Problems, March 2018, Pages 42–52
Abstract:
This study examined the influence of the individual and social background in predicting the rearrest of 1124 juveniles who were first brought into the juvenile detention center in a midsized county in California. Independent variables include demographic characteristics, first offense type, gang affiliation, usage of drug, and family characteristics. Using cross-validation to choose an appropriate machine learning model for predicting rearrest, this study identified that the most important predictors of subsequent arrest are age at first arrest, drug usage, gang affiliation, and family with government assistance. Despite the fact that blacks are overrepresented in the juvenile detention population, race was not a significant predictor for rearrest. Future research would continue to explore the utilization of machine learning adding nontraditional variables to enhance the prediction of recidivism.