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The article focuses on the decision of a victim of crime to notify the police of an assault. The article is concerned with the calling into action of the criminal justice system. The victim's decision to notify the police of a crime is based upon his calculation of the benefits derived from notification and the costs incurred. These costs and benefits may vary by type of crime, of victim, and of situation. Black victims may believe the probability of police action resulting from their notification is very low, while whites may believe the probability is very high. The type of crime committed may be one in which police intervention would be of little use. Burglary or larceny victims may not notify the police because they believe that there is little the police can do to recover their loss. Other victims may refuse to notify the police because they are somehow implicated in the crime itself, or believe the police will think them to be implicated. Thus, the article is an attempt to explore an optimization model of decision-making, a model of victim notification of the police based on the victim's assessment of the costs and benefits derived from notification.

The article focuses on the issue of the victimization and crime in a ghetto community. Field Surveys I collected data on 511 randomly selected adults in three police districts in Washington, D.C. Forty percent of those interviewed said they had never been victimized. The respondents in Washington saw crime as serious, and 75% thought it was getting worse. Field Surveys II focuses on a national, random sample of 10,000 persons, 2,100 of whom were victimized. Despite high crime rates in the police precincts sampled, a majority of the respondents thought their neighborhoods were no worse than most other areas in the city. Respondents were asked whether they had ever been victimized in any of nine possible ways; those who replied affirmatively were asked whether this had happened during the last twelve months. The pattern of victimization by age is different for each race-ethnic group, although the differences by age within each race-ethnic group are small. Long-time residents of the community are more likely to be victimized, in all four race-ethnic groups, than are newcomers, except among blacks, among whom those of medium- and long-term residence are more likely to be victimized.

This paper is an analysis of five hundred criminal homicides in Alabama. It is an attempt to discover regularities and patterns in this type of personal violence with special attention paid to similarities and differences between race and sex categories in their respective homicide patterns. The data on the five hundred cases of criminal homicide were obtained from the files of the Coroner of Jefferson County, Alabama, who maintains a chronological record of all deaths due to violence which occur in the county. The treatment of the data is of two sorts: first, a general analysis of such factors as race, sex and age of the actors in the homicide drama, the spatial distribution of the crimes, the temporal distribution by day of the week and hour of the day, and the nature of the weapons employed; and, secondly, a more specific analysis of the interpersonal patterns involved in the five hundred homicides, the status relations of victims and agents, and the motives and circumstances surrounding the crimes.

The article presents information on a meeting of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) which was held on April 27, 1898 in Boston, Massachusetts. Nominees for AAS membership, including John Wesley Powell and Waldo Lincoln, were elected to the society. An Indian dictionary owned by deceased AAS member J. Hammond Trumbull was donated to the society. A paper on the massacre of Armenians by the Turkish was presented.

Reports developments related to small business in the U.S. as of October 1974. Search for the Small Business Person of the Year; List of small business crimes against small business; Availability of the senate small business report.

The ancient concept of repayment by the offender to the victim of his crime is applied in a new way at the Minnesota Restitution Center. Results evaluated by rigorous research indicate that the program is proving to be effective for adult male offenders who committed crimes against property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on issues concerning police-community relationships. The high visibility via the mass media of public reaction against police has created the impression that public attitudes are predominantly negative. This shared misunderstanding can have self-fulfilling consequences. Police expect a hostile citizen reception and hence take a more authoritarian attitude in order to assure that actions will be seen as legitimate and authority will not be questioned. The article tries to assess the role of the police themselves in creating these negative attitudes as well as examine extra-police factors which produce negative views. The study was designed as a community survey of criminal victimization and attitudes toward the police. Anticipation of being a victim of a criminal act may influence attitudes about the police. People who fear that they are likely targets for criminals may feel that the police is doing an inadequate job of protecting their homes or persons, and, therefore, hold more negative attitude towards police.

Psychological research suggests that harmdoers typically respond in one of two ways after injuring another: (a) sometimes harmdoers make voluntary reparation to the victim, or acquiesce when forced to make reparation; (b) sometimes harmdoers engage in defensive behavior. Instead of acknowledging responsibility for the victim's predicament, they try to justify their harmdoing. They may insist that the victim deserves to suffer or may deny that he was really injured by their actions. This article examines the factors that tend to encourage or prevent individuals from voluntarily reestablishing equitable relationships, and considers the extent to which current legal practices encourage or discourage the equitable resolution of legal disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on the subjective probability of victimization and crime levels. Individuals are constantly making decisions which involve estimates of the probability of their becoming victims of crime. Purchasing theft insurance, installing extra locks and burglar alarms, having a watchdog or purchasing a weapon all represent actions to some extent determined by the individual's subjective probability of becoming a crime victim. In this article, the authors consider one determinate of this subjective probability. Specifically, they analyze the subjective probability of becoming a robbery or burglary victim as a function of the "crime level." The hypothesis is that the higher the crime level in a particular neighborhood, the greater will be an individual's subjective probability of being victimized. At first glance, the hypothesis seems intuitively plausible. Nevertheless, they think it desirable to arrive at a more precise notion of the manner in which people react to crime levels and to provide a simple test of the "rational" elements in the demand for security.

This article discusses the concept of victims and victimization. By the social construction of law itself, all crimes have a victim. Acts, in fact, are defined as criminal because someone or something is conceived of as a victim. In this sense, the victim, that is, a conception of the victim, precedes the definition of an act as criminal. If a victim cannot be imagined, a criminal law is neither created nor enforced. Criminologists have their own conceptions of the victim. Whatever the conceptions, they have consequences when the efforts of criminologists influence public policy. Following the positivistic assumptions of causation, criminologists have investigated the role of the victim in the commission of offenses. The dominant image of the victim held by criminologists is that of the passive victim.

This article presents the results of a study which suggested that criminality corresponds more to affluence than poverty in the U.S. The study was able to illustrate the dual impact of affluence and carelessness in money-handling behavior upon the economics of crime and delinquency in the U.S. While the data reflected money lost by victims of ordinary crime, the principles probably apply with at least equal force to victimization in organized crime. It appears, first, that people cannot move away from these hazards, as population shifts upwards on the income scale, victimization shifts with it. Second, it appears that victims tend to upgrade their losses, that is, proportionately more people lose larger amounts of money. Third, the overall total--money lost by citizens which flows into the hands of members of the criminal sub-societies--tends to rise and accelerate. Evidently, a substantial segment of the public retains the historic mattress and money-belt psychology regarding cash, despite the modern popularization of banking as an institution in American life. The hazard of losing cash has not yet motivated this group towards banks.

This article discusses the role of disciplines of law and social science in the social setting of law enforcement. The social factors in the enforcement encounter, which produce the official definition of crime, are police discretion, police interaction and the influence of complainants' wishes and demeanor on police action. A second social setting that greatly influences the extent of law enforcement and the resultant official crime rate is the setting of victimization. This setting occurs prior to the enforcement encounter and is quite distinct from it except in cases of police observation of crime. The goal of the study observed by the author is to describe why, and under what conditions, victims decide to invoke formal sanctioning procedures in response to criminal victimization. Previous studies have shown that individuals who feel threatened by crime often change their pattern of living. A factor, which may influence sanctioning behavior, is the extent to which a victim's occupation involves some type of norm enforcement. It was observed that, those who perceive themselves as committed to enforcing rules might be more likely to initiate sanctioning when they are the objects of the norm violation.