Villainy
The Dark Figure of Delinquency: New Evidence and Its Underlying Psychopathology
Molly Minkler et al.
Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although research on the dark figure of delinquency has produced valuable quantitative estimates of its size, prior research is mechanistic and atheoretical about the conceptual underpinnings of the crimes that go undetected by the juvenile justice system. Drawing on data from 253 adjudicated youth in residential placements in the Midwestern United States, the current study found that youth self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact. The dark figure of delinquency has a wide distribution with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest. Youth who exhibited more psychopathic features, who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality, males, and those who were older had larger dark figures of delinquency. Findings provide support for general criminological theories that invoke psychopathy or temperament as important individual-level drivers of delinquent conduct, much of which never results in juvenile justice system intervention and thus never achieves legal resolution.
A New Wave of Mass Shootings? Exploring the Potential Impact of COVID-19
Jaclyn Schildkraut & Jillian Turanovic
Homicide Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has brought much of U.S. society to a grinding halt, its impact on the occurrence of mass shootings is largely unknown. Using data from the Gun Violence Archive and an interrupted time-series design, we analyzed weekly counts of mass shootings in the U.S. from 2019 through 2021. Results show that total, private, and public mass shootings increased following the declaration of COVID-19 as a national emergency in March of 2020. We consider these findings in the context of their broader implications for prevention efforts as well as how they pave the way for future research.
More Guns, More Unintended Consequences: The Effects of Right-to-Carry on Criminal Behavior and Policing in US Cities
John Donohue et al.
NBER Working Paper, June 2022
Abstract:
We analyze a sample of 47 major US cities to illuminate the mechanisms that lead Right-to-Carry concealed handgun laws to increase crime. The altered behavior of permit holders, career criminals, and the police combine to generate 29 and 32 percent increases in firearm violent crime and firearm robbery respectively. The increasing firearm violence is facilitated by a massive 35 percent increase in gun theft (p=0.06), with further crime stimulus flowing from diminished police effectiveness, as reflected in a 13 percent decline in violent crime clearance rates (p=0.03). Any crime-inhibiting benefits from increased gun carrying are swamped by the crime-stimulating impacts.
The Cumulative Discretion of Police over Community Complaints
Tony Cheng
American Journal of Sociology, May 2022, Pages 1782-1817
Abstract:
Many policing practices that scholars have identified as deeply flawed are precisely those demanded in police-community meetings. How do initiatives intended for police reform become dominated by demands for more policing? I analyze 1.5 years of ethnographic data on the New York Police Department's neighborhood policing meetings. Amid highly publicized police violence, America's largest police force is curating the public's complaints -- not ignoring them -- from constituents strategically cultivated through community initiatives. Whereas existing studies conceptualize complaints as grievance tools or liability risks, this case reveals how police conceive community complaints as endorsements of services. This conception guides "cumulative discretion" or selective decision-making across multiple stages: police mobilize, record, internalize, and represent complaints demanding police services, while excluding those seeking reforms to over- and unequal policing. Gaps thus persist between the reforms that some residents seek and the services that police offer. This article offers insights into how organizational imperatives for legitimacy can undermine institutional reforms.
A comparative interrupted time-series assessing the impact of the Armstrong decision on officer-involved shootings
Hunter Boehme, Robert Kaminski & Peter Leasure
Police Practice and Research, August 2022, Pages 614-622
Abstract:
In the 2016 case of Estate of Armstrong V. The Village of Pinehurst (Armstrong), the Fourth Circuit Court decided to significantly restrict CED use to only encounters that pose an 'immediate safety risk' or 'immediate danger.' Some authors have argued that the decision from Armstrong could lead to increased officer-involved shootings. The present study tests this prediction by utilizing a comparative interrupted time-series analysis. Findings from time-series count models show statistically significant increases in monthly and weekly officer-involved shootings (OISs) within the Fourth Circuit, and statistically significant decreases in weekly OISs among states comparable to, but outside the Fourth Circuit's jurisdiction. Policy implications of these findings are discussed in detail.
Officer-Involved: The Media Language of Police Killings
Jonathan Moreno-Medina et al.
NBER Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
This paper studies the language used in television news broadcasts to describe police killings in the United States from 2013-19. We begin by documenting that the media is significantly more likely to use several language structures - e.g., passive voice, nominalization, intransitive verbs - that obfuscate responsibility for police killings compared to civilian homicides. We next use an online experiment to test whether these language differences matter. Participants are less likely to hold a police officer morally responsible for a killing and to demand penalties after reading a story that uses obfuscatory language. In the experiment, the language used in the story matters more when the decedent is not reported to be armed, prompting a final research question: is media obfuscation more common in high leverage circumstances, when the public might be more inclined to judge the police harshly? Returning to the news data, we find that news broadcasts are indeed especially likely to use obfuscatory language structures when the decedent was unarmed or when body camera video is available. Through this important case study, our paper highlights the importance of incorporating the semantic structure of language, in addition to the amount and slant of coverage, in analyses of how the media shapes perceptions.
Officer-Involved Shootings and Concealed Carry Weapons Permitting Laws: Analysis of Gun Violence Archive Data, 2014-2020
Mitchell Doucette et al.
Journal of Urban Health, June 2022, Pages 373-384
Abstract:
About 1,000 civilians are killed every year by a law enforcement officer in the USA, more than 90% by firearms. Most civilians who are shot are armed with a firearms. Higher rates of officer-involved shootings (OIS) are positively associated with state-level firearm ownership. Laws relaxing restrictions on civilians carrying concealed firearms (CCW) have been associated with increased violent crime. This study examines associations between CCW laws and OIS. We accessed counts of fatal and nonfatal OIS from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) from 2014-2020 and calculated rates using population estimates. We conducted legal research to identify passage years of CCW laws. We used an augmented synthetic control models with fixed effects to estimate the effect of Permitless CCW law adoption on OIS over fourteen biannual semesters. We calculated an inverse variance weighted average of the overall effect. On average, Permitless CCW adopting states saw a 12.9% increase in the OIS victimization rate or an additional 4 OIS victimizations per year, compared to what would have happened had law adoption not occurred. Lax laws regulating civilian carrying of concealed firearms were associated with higher incidence of OIS. The increase in concealed gun carrying frequency associated with these laws may influence the perceived threat of danger faced by law enforcement. This could contribute to higher rates of OIS.
Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It
Sara Heller et al.
NBER Working Paper, June 2022
Abstract:
This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. We address central concerns about police data and algorithmic bias by predicting shooting victimization rather than arrest, which we show accurately captures risk differences across demographic groups despite bias in the predictors. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 130 times higher than the average Chicagoan. Although Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions, those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits: predictive accuracy among the top 500 people justifies spending up to $123,500 per person for an intervention that could cut their risk of being shot in half.
Estimating the effects of shrinking the criminal justice system on criminal recidivism
Charles Loeffler & Anthony Braga
Criminology & Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined the impact of Raise the Age (RTA) in Massachusetts, which increased the maximum jurisdictional age for its juvenile court in late 2013. Using statewide re-arraignment data and a difference-in-differences research design comparing affected 17-year-olds to unaffected 18-year-olds, we find that RTA increased recidivism for affected 17-year-olds. The observed increases in recidivism were especially large for 17-year-olds without prior justice involvement. This result may stem from the more extensive use of pretrial supervision or the diminished deterrence of prosecution within the Massachusetts juvenile justice system.
Community Impacts of Mass Incarceration
Arpit Gupta, Christopher Hansman & Evan Riehl
NYU Working Paper, May 2022
Abstract:
Student achievement is lower in communities with high incarceration rates. To investigate this relationship, we assemble a new dataset which matches students' academic performance to the court records of household members. Exploiting the exogenous turnover of judges (who vary in their tendency to incarcerate), we find that increases in the incarceration rate negatively impact the test scores of children in the community, including those who do not directly experience the incarceration of a household member. To explain this result, we show that (i) direct household exposure to incarceration adversely impacts student test scores and behavioral outcomes, and (ii) these effects spill over onto the academic performance of classmates. While smaller in magnitude per student, spillover effects aggregate to explain the majority of the causal relationship between community level incarceration and student achievement. Our results highlight important consequences of incarceration for access to opportunity within entire communities.
Paws on the Street: Neighborhood-Level Concentration of Households with Dogs and Urban Crime
Nicolo Pinchak et al.
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
The formative work of Jane Jacobs underscores the combination of "eyes on the street" and trust between residents in deterring crime. Nevertheless, little research has assessed the effects of residential street monitoring on crime due partly to a lack of data measuring this process. We argue that neighborhood-level rates of households with dogs captures part of the residential street monitoring process core to Jacobs' hypotheses and test whether this measure is inversely associated with property and violent crime rates. Data from a large-scale marketing survey of Columbus, OH, USA residents (2013; n = 43,078) are used to measure census block group-level (n = 595) rates of households with dogs. Data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study are used to measure neighborhood-level rates of trust. Consistent with Jacobs' hypotheses, results indicate that neighborhood concentration of households with dogs is inversely associated with robbery, homicide, and, to a less consistent degree, aggravated assault rates within neighborhoods high in trust. In contrast, results for property crime suggest that the inverse association of dog concentration is independent of levels of neighborhood trust. These associations are observed net of controls for neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics, temporally lagged crime, and spatial lags of trust and dog concentration. This study offers suggestive evidence of crime deterrent benefits of local street monitoring and dog presence and calls attention to the contribution of pets to other facets of neighborhood social organization.
Tooth for a tooth: Does fighting serve as a deterrent to greater violence in the modern NHL
Michael Betz
PLoS ONE, June 2022
Abstract:
Fighting has been part of the fabric of the NHL for nearly a century. Recent sharp declines in the frequency of fighting and increased understanding of the long-term consequences of traumatic brain injuries have led many to question whether fighting still has a place in the modern NHL. League commissioner Gary Bettman as recently as 2019 testified before Canadian Parliament that fighting has a deterrent effect, reducing the overall level of violent and dangerous plays within the game. This study empirically examines this claim and tests whether fighting indeed serves as a deterrent to undesirable behaviors in the NHL. I examine data on all regular season penalties from 2010-2019 to determine whether fighting and the threat of fighting is empirically related the level of violence in NHL games. Using a mix of descriptive and quasi-experimental approaches, I find no quantifiable evidence that fighting serves as a deterrent to undesirable violent behaviors in the NHL. To the contrary, I find that teams and players who fight are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the violent penalties that happen across the league. These results have implications for player safety in the many professional - and especially junior - hockey leagues around the world that sanction in-game fighting.