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Prior police decision-making research is limited by (1) its emphasis on individual and organizational predictors and (2) cross-sectional designs, which fail to account for the time-varying aspects of police activities and the factors explaining them. Using group-based trajectory modeling, this study tested the ability of social disorganization theory to explain arrest activity at the Census block group level in Dallas, Texas. Social disorganization variables helped predict certain arrest trajectories, but not all of them. Specifically, socio-economic status was significant in low and medium arrest trajectory groups. An interaction between racial heterogeneity and family disruption was also significant in the medium arrest trajectory group. Theoretical implications are discussed.

A large body of research demonstrates the toll stress takes on police. However, with recent high-profile force incidents that have fueled distrust of police especially within minority communities, there is reason to expect that minority officers experience stress differently than their white counterparts. Within the context of Agnew’s (1992) General Strain Theory, this study examines the relationship between police stress and misconduct. As well, since a police stress/anger relationship has been found, we also analyze racial differences in the extent to which negative affect (anger) mediates the stress/outcome relationship. Using data from a survey of over 1,400 police officers working in three large cities in Texas, we find that stress is significantly related to officers’ acts of misconduct within both races. Moreover, there are noticeable differences in the role anger plays in the stress/misconduct relationship among white and minority officers.

Researchers are working to identify appropriate benchmarks for exploring racial bias in the officer-involved shooting (OIS) context. Two recent studies benchmarked OIS against incidents in which of...

In Moore v. Texas (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Texas death penalty definitions of intellectual disability were inadequate because they strayed too far from clinical definitions. This study examines how each state defines intellectual disability with regard to death penalty eligibility. It reveals a wide variation in the standards used by states, with no clear consensus on definitions of intellectual disability or who should measure it. Variations pertain to age at onset, proof of intellectual disability status at the time of the crime, burden of proof required to make the intellectual disability determination, and who makes the final decision. Implications and suggestions for the future are discussed.

The larger literature on police stress indicates that much of their stress emanates from two sources: organizational and environmental. These sources coexist in officers’ lives but function differently across police agencies. Officer experiences with stress also tend to lead to emotional reactions, some of which can be negative and increase the risk of misconduct. Agnew’s general strain theory provides one useful theoretical framework within which the relationship between officer strain and negative emotions can be investigated. Using data from three urban Texas police agencies, this study investigates the main sources of police strain as predictors of anger, depression, and burnout. Further, differences in negative emotions across agencies are also examined. Results show that organizational stress is significantly related to all three negative emotions across agencies. Implications and future research directions are highlighted.

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.

Previous tests of the maturity gap thesis incorporated one-dimensional autonomy-based measures of social maturity. We present the first test of the maturity gap thesis to incorporate psychosocial measures (i.e., temperance, responsibility, and perspective). Four delinquency and substance abuse variables from Wave 2 of the Add Health data were regressed on the following variables developed from Wave 1: relative pubertal development, relative psychosocial maturity, personal autonomy, and interactions among each ( n = 4,530 participants younger than 18 and 294 older than 18). Personal autonomy lost significance when psychosocial maturity, personal autonomy, and pubertal development were included in the same model. However, psychosocial maturity did not clearly interact with either personal autonomy or pubertal development. Psychosocial maturity was associated with deviant behaviors for both males and females, above and below age 18.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the utility of general strain theory in explaining the relationship between organizational stress and police deviance. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from a non-random sample of 1,389 police officers in three large cities in Texas. The survey instrument used for this research was the Police Work Experience Survey. Results from regression analyses are presented. Findings Findings showed that the organization influenced police misconduct, but misconduct was dependent upon the specific type of strain encountered. Research limitations/implications Results show that instances of police deviance depend on the types of strains encountered. Additionally, anger plays a significant role when examining organizational strain. Police administrators should move to reduce organizational strains to reduce instances of police misconduct. Originality/value Currently, there is very little theoretical work in understanding police misconduct. And no studies have drawn linkages between organizational stressors and self-reported officer misconduct. At a time when police behavior is at the forefront of the social policy reform, the examination of potential correlates of police misconduct is the first step toward controlling it.

Purpose The purpose of the study was to identify factors associated with officer firearm and conducted energy weapon displays. Our specific concern was whether black subjects were more likely to have firearms drawn against them relative to other subjects. Methods Officer- and incident-level “response to resistance” data from the New Orleans Police Department were analyzed. Logistic regression models controlling for officer, subject, and situational factors were estimated to predict officer weapon draws. Results When analyzing all officer-level actions, black subjects were more likely to have firearms drawn against them than other subjects, but subject race was insignificant in incident-level analyses. Additionally, situational characteristics explained more variance in the data than officer or subject characteristics alone. Conclusions We found no consistent evidence of racial bias in firearm draws. Results hinged to an extent on the samples analyzed and statistical models estimated. In addition, our findings apply solely to one city and highlight the complexity of use-of-force research and the need for further replication.

Past studies of crime clearance rates have largely ignored the role of investigators in the process. This omission is important because criminal investigation is essential to clearing crimes, particularly those in which offenders are not readily identifiable. Using data from 570 law enforcement agencies spanning a 13-year period from 2000 to 2012, this study developed group-based trajectories of violent and property crime clearance rates (an approach not taken in previous clearance rate research), then modeled group membership with two measures of investigative spending and one of the proportion of investigators in sampled agencies (“investigative resources”), while controlling for factors such as workload and crime type. Results from a series of multinomial regression models suggest investigative resources play only a marginal role in crime clearance trajectories. This finding is consistent with early detective research, including the classic RAND criminal investigative process study.

Peer review is the bedrock of the scientific enterprise, yet it enjoys scant validation. The federal government’s CrimeSolutions.gov initiative provides a unique opportunity to address this limitation. As part of the initiative, trained experts evaluate criminal justice evaluation research on several of the same criteria editors use to make publication decisions. Data from a sample of articles published in Social Sciences Citation Index journals were obtained from the CrimeSolutions.gov database, then used to model publication quality, operationalized as the product of the journal’s five-year impact factor and article citations per year (an article-level measure). The model explained only five percent of the variation in publication quality, raising several questions about the validity of peer review in criminal justice evaluation research.

Deterrence researchers have abandoned a one-size-fits-all approach and identified a wide range of individual characteristics (e.g., low self-control, emotional arousal) associated with the decision to offend. Comparatively less attention has been given to the moderating effects of purely situational factors on intentions to break the law. Drawing on social control and rational choice literatures, we utilized a vignette-based survey and asked a sample of young adults to report on their likelihood of driving drunk under conditions of high and low informal social control. We then explored the effects of certainty and severity of punishment on offending likelihood across both conditions. Among deterrable offenders, we found that the relationship between severity and compliance manifested only in the presence of high informal social control. Certainty was significantly and inversely associated with offending likelihood in both high and low informal social control conditions—among both deterrables and the full sample. Implications for deterrence theory are discussed.

Purpose Gang membership has been linked in a number of prior studies with inmate misconduct; known gang members are more prone than non-gang members to act violently behind bars. Theories of intergroup conflict suggest, however, there is reason to expect that broader within-prison gang dynamics, not just gang membership alone, are associated with the incidence of violence. Methods We collected data on inmates from a large southern state and estimated multilevel models of inmate-on-inmate violence. Included in our models were a variety of common individual-level correlates of violent misconduct, among them gang membership. Substantive prison-level correlates included the percentage of gang members and “gang integration,” the latter being a measure of gang heterogeneity. Results We found a modest association between both gang variables and inmate-on-inmate violence, with gang integration being the most significant of the two. Conclusions Gang membership is an important correlate of inmate violence, but attention to broader prison gang dynamics is clearly necessary. We discuss the implications of this finding for theories of inmate violence.

Police officers are said to possess a “sixth sense,” defined in terms of suspicion, fear, intuition, and even common sense. Research and training on the sixth sense, however, lack theoretical guidance. To address this shortcoming, the author likens the sixth sense to an experiential thinking style, which not only explains why police officers presumably have it, but also makes it possible to know whether they even have a sixth sense at all.

Purpose Tests of social support theory have relied on aggregate crime rates as the outcome of interest, but such a focus ignores the potentially important macro-level processes and effects on individual-level behavior We thus perform the first multi-level investigation of social support theory. Methods Multilevel modeling is used to explore whether the two varieties of county-level social support – the presence of charitable organizations and AFDC expenditures – are associated with recidivism in a sample of Florida prison releasees. Results Results show that while social support explains little variation in individual-level recidivism, a combination of private and public social support may reduce the likelihood of reconviction for drug offenses. Conclusion Findings provide mixed evidence for the prospect that social support—whether governmental or nongovernmental—is associated with recidivism among recently-released inmates.

Researchers have recently combined individual-level data with institutional measures to detect prison-level correlates of inmate misconduct. Although this body of literature has yielded insights into how the prison environment contributes to misconduct, we argue that it has ignored an important level of analysis, namely the custody level. As some inmates are placed in more restrictive confinement than others, custody levels may absorb some of the variation in individual-level and/or prison-level correlates of misconduct. Accordingly, we analyzed data from over 70,000 inmates who were housed in Texas prisons during 2008 and found that custody levels were strongly and positively associated with misconduct, even (a) after accounting for the endogeneity of custody levels and (b) once inmate- and prison-level measures were included. We draw on labeling theory in our efforts to explain the relationship between custody levels and misconduct.

This article tests social support theory with a focus on the relationship between general relief payments to the poor and homicide. General relief, a new and untapped measure of social support, represents an improvement on earlier measures of social support, such as welfare spending, because it (a) reflects local priorities, (b) includes both cash grants and in-kind services, and (c) is sufficiently variable at the local level to make it statistically useful. Data from Worrall (2005) were reanalyzed, revealing that general relief was inversely related to homicide, even in the face of various robustness checks.

Researchers have been unable to determine whether individuals’ estimates of incivilities can be separated from constructs such as crime and victimization. Accordingly, survey respondents’ perceptions of incivilities were compared first to their perceptions of neighborhood crime and then to their personal victimization experiences. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that perceptions of incivilities (of the physical variety) loaded on factors separate from personal victimization. It was not clear, however, whether perceptions of incivilities were independent from perceived crime. Even so, the findings provide some evidence that estimates of incivilities represent a construct separate from estimates of crime, thereby increasing the likelihood that certain perceptual incivility measures enjoy discriminant validity.

The authors analyzed police records to explore why suspects resist arrest. The analysis was based on a sample of 400 police reports from a mid-size urban police department in Southern California. Two hundred cases involved suspects who were charged with resisting arrest. The remaining 200 cases involved arrested suspects who did not resist. The authors used logistic regression to explore the association between several demographic factors and a binary outcome measuring suspect resistance. They found that suspects arrested in police beats characterized by a disproportionate number of calls for service were more likely to resist. They further found that Black suspects were more likely to resist relative to their White and Hispanic counterparts. The authors also explored interaction effects.

Each year more offenders are sentenced to probation than to any other sanction in the criminal justice system. In spite of the saliency of probation programs, the evidence is mixed concerning their effectiveness. In order to address this important gap in the research, the authors sought to determine if probation was effective in achieving one of its stated goals: protecting public safety. In doing so, they conducted a macro-level analysis, exploring the relationship between probation caseloads and property crime rates in each county in California over a nine-year period. Results from a two-way fixed effects regression model suggested that as probation loads increased, so did crime. While additional research into the effectiveness of probation is clearly needed, the results of the analysis nevertheless indicated that improvements in public safety could be expected if probation caseloads were reduced.

Most studies concerning police-community relations have operationalized support for-law enforcement agencies in unidimensional terms. The present study dissects the notion of support for the police into two distinct dimensions: efficacy and image. Efficacy includes perceptions of the police ability to protect citizens, solve crime, and prevent crime. Image includes perceptions of friendliness and fairness of the police. A series of conventional individual-level and contextual variables are modeled in an effort to explore their relative influence on citizen perceptions of police efficacy and image. Data gathered from a national telephone survey of 1,005 citizens reveal that support for local police is both complex and multidimensional. Moreover, the results demonstrate that efficacy and image are independent dimensions, and that each is susceptible to quite different ratings depending upon which independent and dependent variables are modeled.

Panel data were analyzed to determine whether funding for collaborative juvenile crime prevention programs reduced arrests in California counties. Because the data were a population (i.e., all 58 counties in the state), regression results were summarized descriptively, and special attention was given to the direction and magnitude of key coefficients. Funding was associated with little to no overall reductions in arrests for felonies, misdemeanors, and status offenses. However, estimates of arrests prevented varied across each of the 14 counties that received funding.