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From January 1979 to December 2009, the Maoist insurgent Shining Path committed a total of 9,034 violent acts in a concerted attempt to topple the Peruvian government. These acts of violence included bombings, armed assaults, and assassinations. The Shining Path's leader Abimael Guzmán was captured by the Peruvian government on 12 September 1992. Using quarterly data and an interrupted times-series AutoRegressive Integrative Moving Average (ARIMA) study design, we investigated the effect of Abimael Guzmán's capture on the ability of the Shining Path to wage its war against the Peruvian government. Maximum-likelihood results revealed that the frequency of terrorist acts committed by the Shining Path dropped by 143 incidents per quarter a short time after Guzmán was captured. The analysis also evinced a positive relationship between the lethality of attacks and the frequency of the Shining Path's terrorist activity. We conclude that targeted capture shows some promise as an effective counterterrorism strategy, at least for terrorist groups such as the Shining Path that have a top-down type of organizational structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study analyzes the association between police organizational and environmental factors and police misconduct using data derived from the new National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project (2009–2010). Our use of this data set affords us the opportunity to measure police misconduct with much greater breadth than in previous studies. A negative binomial regression analysis of 497 city police departments shows the following organizational characteristics—organizational size, the presence of a full-time internal affairs unit, and in-service training—salient in predicting police misconduct. The violent crime rate is the only environmental variable that influences police misconduct. These results not only highlight the importance of organizational structure in influencing police officer misconduct but they also suggest that a police department has at its disposal the ability to institute organizational changes that can help attenuate the occurrence of police misconduct. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While past research has considered the effects of police organizational characteristics on various outcomes, including arrest rates, relatively little research has explored the role of the racial composition of the police and its association with race-specific arrest rates. Furthermore, no research has explored the association between arrest probabilities for Black and White offenders and police organizational factors. Using data from the 2000 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the 2000 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), and the 2000 decennial Census, the present exploratory study employs multilevel modeling to examine the association between police organizational factors including the percentage of the police force that is Black and arrest probabilities for offenders involved in 19,099 aggravated assaults and 100,859 simple assaults across 105 small cities. Results show that for simple assaults, the relative size of the Black police force is associated with the risk of arrest for both Black and White offenders. Furthermore, departments with relatively more Black police officers are found to have the largest gap in the arrest probabilities for White and Black offenders, although Whites are more likely to be arrested for assaults than Blacks, regardless of the racial composition of the police. Results also show those departments with more written policy directives, relatively larger administrative component, a higher educational-level requirement, and centralized police departments have the highest arrest probabilities. Implications of these findings and recommendations for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a conceptual model articulating the mechanisms by which racial threat is theorized to affect social control, focusing specifically on the influence of the relative size of the black population on the likelihood that the police will arrest a black citizen suspected of a violent criminal offense. A multilevel analysis of 145,255 violent crimes reported to police in 182 cities during 2000 shows only qualified support for racial threat theory. Controlling for the amount of race-specific crime reported to police, our findings reveal that black citizens actually have a lower probability of arrest in cities with a relatively large black population. This finding tends to cast doubt on the validity of the racial threat hypothesis. No evidence buttresses the claim that economic competition between whites and blacks affects arrest probabilities. However, results show that in cities where racial segregation is more pronounced blacks have a reduced risk of being arrested relative to whites. Crimes involving black offenders and white victims are also more apt to result in an arrest in cities that are racially segregated. These findings support the view that racial segregation is an informal mechanism to circumscribe the threat of potentially volatile subordinate populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although blacks are arrested disproportionately for most types of violent crimes, disagreement persists as to the extent to which official arrest data are indicative of differential offending behavior or selection bias on the part of law enforcement personnel Using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), we assess the effect of an offender's race on the probability of arrest for 335,619 incidents of forcible rape, robbery, and assault in 17 states during 1999. The baseline model for these comparisons is the equiprobability hypothesis that relative to violation frequency as reported by crime victims, the likelihood of arrest for white and black offenders is roughly equal. Multivariate logistic regression results show that the odds of arrest for white offenders is approximately 22% higher for robbery, 13% higher for aggravated assault, and 9% higher for simple assault than they are for black offenders. An offender's race plays no noteworthy role in the likelihood of arrest for the crime of forcible rape. These findings suggest that the disproportionately high arrest rate for black citizens is most likely attributable to differential involvement in reported crime rather than to racially biased law enforcement practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using longitudinal data calibrated in daily intervals and a vector ARMA (VARMA) study design, we investigate the causal relations among the number of crimes reported to the police, the frequency of arrest, and the number of defendants held in pretrial jail confinement. Results show a lagged negative effect of frequency of arrest on reported crime. As the number of arrests made by police increases, the number of index crimes reported to authorities decreases substantially the following day. Additionally, the analysis reveals a significant positive contemporaneous relationship between criminal activity and arrest levels. No feedback effects among the three variables are noted. In sum, our findings add empirical support to the thesis that the instantaneous and lagged relationship between crime and clearances are of opposite sign. That is, criminal activity increases arrest levels instantaneously, or at least relatively so, while the negative effect of arrest levels on crime levels transpires more gradually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence shows that unemployment influences levels of incarceration. Theory attributes this relationship to the state's attempt to control labor surpluses. Studies testing the Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939) thesis yield questionable results, however, because they rely on convicted offender data. Using longitudinal data and a Box-Jenkins Autoregressive-Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) modeling method, we investigate the effect of unemployment rates on pretrial incarceration rates. We include controls for arrest rates, jail capacity, and three court processing variables. Although our preliminary bivariate analysis revealed that the aggregate unemployment rate was significantly and positively related to pretrial incarceration for misdemeanors, this correlation became nonsignificant in the ARIMA analysis. The relationship between unemployment and the incarceration rate for pretrial felony defendants was also nonsignificant. Taken in total, our results suggest that the Rusche and Kirchheimer thesis overstates the importance of unemployment in explaining levels of incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]