Eyewitness susceptibility to co-witness misinformation is influenced by co-witness confidence and own self-confidence

If an eyewitness is exposed to a co-witness statement that incorrectly blames an innocent bystander for a crime, the eyewitness can be influenced by this statement and also blame the innocent bystander for the crime. This effect is known as blame conformity. In two studies, we examined whether or not this effect is influenced by the degree of confidence a co-witness expresses in her incorrect statement (Study 1) and an eyewitness’s own level of self-confidence (Study 2). Participant eyewitnesses first watched a crime video featuring a perpetrator and an innocent bystander, then read a co-witness statement about the crime that either correctly blamed the perpetrator, incorrectly blamed the innocent bystander, or blamed nobody (a control condition). They were then asked who committed the crime. In Study 1, participants who read an incorrect statement were at increased risk of engaging in blame conformity when the co-witness expressed a high level of confidence, compared to a low level of confidence, in the accuracy of her statement. In Study 2, participants who were lowest in self-confidence were at increased risk of engaging in blame conformity. The theoretical underpinnings of these effects are considered.     

LOW SELF-CONTROL,SOCIAL BONDS,AND CRIME: SOCIAL CAUSATION,SOCIAL SELECTION,OR BOTH?*

This article examines the social-selection and social-causation processes that generate criminal behavior. We describe these processes with three theoretical models: a social-causation model that links crime to contemporaneous social relationships; a social-selection model that links crime to personal characteristics formed in childhood; and a mixed selection-causation model that links crime to social relationships and childhood characteristics. We tested these models with a longitudinal study in Dunedin, New Zealand, of individuals followed from birth through age 21. We analyzed measures of childhood and adolescent low self-control as well as adolescent and adult social bonds and criminal behavior. In support of social selection, we found that low self-control in childhood predicted disrupted social bonds and criminal offending later in life. In support of social causation, we found that social bonds and adolescent delinquency predicted later adult crime and, further, that the effect of self-control on crime was largely mediated by social bonds. In support of both selection and causation, we found that the social-causation effects remained significant even when controlling for preexisting levels of self-control, but that their effects diminished. Taken together, these findings support theoretical models that incorporate social-selection and social-causation processes.     

Ecological considerations in victim reporting to the police

A review of recent criminological literature suggests that different systems of social control operate across the urban-rural dimension. Specifically, it is expected that victims in urban areas will report crimes to the police at a higher rate than victims in surburban and rural areas. Moreover, it is anticipated that urban, suburban, and rural victims will have different reasons for not reporting the crime. In this paper these issues are examined empirically using the National Crime Survey victimization data. These data show that, contrary to theoretical expectations, the extent of victim reporting does not vary across the urban-rural dimension for the crimes of rape, robbery, assault, and personal larceny. Characteristics of the offense, notably seriousness, are shown to be more important in victim reporting than the extent of urbanization. In addition, these data indicate that victim residence in conjunction with type of crime and victim-offender relationship has an influence on the reasons selected by victims for not reporting the crime to the police.     

Reporting to the police in western nations: A theoretical analysis of the effects of social context

One of the most consistent findings in empirical studies using victimization data is that the decision to report victimization to the police is determined in large part by the seriousness of the crime. The police will be notified more often of crimes that involve more serious injury or greater monetary loss. These findings, however, may be due to the fact that most studies on reporting have been conducted using victimization surveys that devote a great deal of attention to the crime event and victim characteristics and much less to the social context of that event. As a result, influences on reporting operating at the neighborhood, jurisdiction, or nation level have been neglected. The aim of this paper is to bring social context into the discourse on reporting to the police by presenting a much more inclusive model of crime reporting. In addition, the influence of four aspects of macro-level social context on reporting are tested—the perceived competence of the police, institutionalization of insurance business, norm of conformity, and level of individualism—by merging incident-level data from the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) for 16 Western industrialized countries with nation-level data from various sources. Hierarchical logistic modeling is used to analyze the nested data. The perceived competence of the police has a positive effect on whether property crimes are reported.     

人身危险性在我国刑法中的功能定位

人身危险性最基本的涵义 ,是指再犯可能性。再犯可能性 ,属于已然的社会危害性范畴 ,而主观恶性则是人身危险性的表征之一。人身危险性在罪责刑结构中 ,并不当然地起决定作用 ,只是在一定程度上起着修正的作用。我们可以以行为人没有人身危险性或者人身危险性较小为由 ,认定行为人的行为不构成犯罪 ;但不能以行为人存在着人身危险性或者人身危险性较大为由 ,认定行为人的行为构成犯罪。人身危险性不能增加刑罚量 ,只在其较小或没有的时候 ,起减小刑罚量的作用。无论在定罪中还是在量刑中 ,人身危险性只应具有这一单向性的功能     

BYSTANDER REPORTING OF A CRIME:

A field experiment was conducted to study bystander reporting of a crime. The study investigated two primary dimensions upon which most programs which encourage reporting, namely, monetary reward and anonymity. Conditions of anonymity and reward were unobtrusively varied during a bogus interview conducted with shoppers before they entered a supermarket. Neither of these variables affected the reporting of a staged shoplifting. However, preincident behavioral intention to report was significantly correlated with reporting behavior. The findings are discussed with respect to research on intrinsic motivation and deindividuation.     

Crime Reporting Decisions and the Costs of Crime

The paper develops a model of crime reporting based on an economic approach. It identifies the principal costs and benefits of reporting from the victim’s perspective, taking account of insurance provision and the risk of intimidation by an offender. It shows how a victim might use backward induction to infer a rational reporting strategy. The recording of crime by the police is a process that relies on victim reports, and is thus influenced by the reporting decisions made by victims. The paper uses empirical evidence from the British Crime Survey and from the International Crime Victims Survey to explore the hypotheses generated by the model. It finds support for the suggestion that the propensity to report a crime increases with the size of the loss entailed. The paper also explores the implications of the findings for the estimation of the costs of crime. Reporting and intimidation costs are generally excluded from bottom-up estimates of costs, an omission that may be quite serious in the context of offences such as domestic violence.     

NEIGHBORHOOD STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS,INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL ATTITUDES,AND YOUTHS' CRIME REPORTING INTENTIONS*

Although the “stop snitching” phenomenon has brought recent attention to crime reporting, researchers have recognized for a long time the importance of this issue. Early studies focused on individual-level factors related to reporting, but recently, researchers have begun to examine neighborhood-level predictors. Most of these studies, however, omit key individual-level predictors of reporting and provide relatively little insight into the individual-level processes through which neighborhood context might affect reporting. This study uses survey data from a multisite, school-based study to examine whether neighborhood structural characteristics and individual-level attitudes and experiences are related to youths’ intentions to report crime. In addition, we assess whether neighborhood characteristics influence reporting via their effect on individual-level attitudes and experiences. We find that neighborhood poverty has an inverse relationship with crime reporting intentions and that numerous individual-level measures are associated with reporting, including attitudes toward the police, delinquency, and perceptions of the community. Importantly, the effects of neighborhood characteristics are reduced when youths’ attitudes and experiences are included in the model. Taken together, our findings suggest that neighborhood context might affect reporting by shaping the attitudes and experiences of youth.     

Property Crime Victims' Decision to Notify the Police: Social,Cognitive, and Affective Determinants

Previous research suggests that 3 general processes underlie the decision of property crime victims to notify the police: One that is cognitively driven by reward/cost considerations, one that is affectively driven, and another that is socially driven. This study is the first to employ a community sample of crime victims to compare the 3 processes within a single study. Computer-assisted interviews were conducted with 422 property crime victims (n = 129 burglary, n = 293 theft) located via a random digit dialing procedure. Logistic regression analyses showed that each process independently accounted for a significant amount of the variance in victim reporting, and that there were no interactions among the three processes in predicting reporting. Of the 3 processes, social influence was the best predictor of reporting. Analysis of the affect-driven process showed that reporting was primarily a function of the level of fear rather than anger or the level of generalized arousal upon discovering the crime.     

论主客观相统一原则在犯罪论中的贯彻——兼论丢失枪支不报罪的犯罪构成

主客观相统一原则要求犯罪成立要符合主观要件与客观要件之间的统一。但是,当成立犯罪要求发生实质性的危害结果时,就出现了贯彻该原则难以解决的理论难题。对于"丢失枪支不报罪"等以发生严重后果为构成要件的犯罪情形,实践中所犯的普遍性错误就在于割裂了行为结果与行为性质的联系,将行为人对一般违法性质的认识因素当做对刑法的严重危害性质的认识予以评价,从而得出行为人行为时出于故意的错误结论。因此,《刑法》将没有必然联系的"不报告行为"与"严重结果"规定为丢失枪支不报罪的客观要件,忽视了丢失枪支行为才是严重后果发生的真正原因。为此建议将该罪罪名改为"丢失枪支罪",以使该原则在犯罪论领域得到贯彻。     

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

There is a great deal of research on the structure of narrative and its mode, and on the narrative positioning and counter positioning of the actor in legal and social contexts. In offender narratives, personal experiences are embedded for observation and analysis of particular realities that contextualize a disposition of the perpetrator being ‘an undergoer’ rather than an ‘effector’ of actions. This is evaluated in the shift from a narrated action to a speaker utterance in prospection and also in anticipation of the criminal act. Using ‘grammatical logic’, it is also possible to demonstrate how the crucial event (the crime) is not a cause, but an effect of a personal theme that encapsulates pattern of circumstances when the narrative outcome in criminal narrative becomes the product of its discursive practices. This is the ‘story of intentionality’ (my term) in crime narratives, characteristically embedded within the 1st the story of crime, the 2nd is the story of investigation [14, 20]. Using techniques from functional grammar and critical stylistics for discourse analysis, I intend to show an effective approach for the search of offender theme that underlies an act of crime. These disciplines provide the analyst with the linguistic material to analyse intersentential cohesion in a chain of semantically linked sentences (in written or spoken discourse) that explore the ways in which things are ‘made to look’ in the structure and functions of the English language. As a case study, I am using an offender narrative from Tony Parker’s book Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers (1990) showing an effective approach for the search of personal themes underlying the act of crime. Offender theme analyses are also valuable for evaluating the changing nature or development of offender characteristics pre or post crime.     

AN EXPLORATION OF THE DETERMINANTS OF REPORTING CRIME TO THE POLICE IN THE CITY OF TIANJIN,CHINA*

Western research has investigated three types of correlates of crime reporting–victim‐specific (individual or household), incident‐specific, and environment‐specific variables. The current study applies this general, analytical framework to explore the determinants of crime reporting to the police in contemporary urban China. Using data collected from a recent survey of criminal victimization in Tianjin, we assess the determinants for reporting of robbery, assault, personal theft, and household burglary. The results consistently show that offense seriousness is a significant predictor of reporting for all offenses studied. Also, a nonlinear relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and reporting of burglary is found. In contrast, individual‐specific and household‐specific factors do not affect reporting, with the exception of a cumulative measure of victimization experience. Measures of neighborhood social cohesion and informal control are also not associated with reporting. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to the unique neighborhood organizational infrastructure in urban China.     

Understanding differences in crime reporting practices: a comparative approach

Despite a large body of literature detailing crime reporting practices, scant research examines the correlates of the crime reporting decision in developing nations with newer democracies, newer economies, or developing economies. Using a sample of 23 nations from the 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS), this study tests the generalizability of correlates of robbery and assault reports to the police in a non-US sample to determine whether there are national differences in reporting practices. Based on this analysis emphasizing the developing world and countries in transition, an expanded model, integrating incident, demographic, police-related, and national variables, is developed that will enhance our understanding of differences in reporting practices in developing and developed nations. Results identified both similarities and differences in crime reporting practices between developed and developing nations. Although the findings reinforce the importance of incident and demographic characteristics on reporting crime to the police, they also suggest that national variables, reflecting economic and social context, should not be excluded from studies examining reporting practices.     

文化环境与犯罪

文化环境是指存在于人类主体周围并影响主体活动的各种精神文化条件的总和。文化环境影响犯罪是通过影响人的动物性和文化性的强化和弱化而实现的,就是其作用于个人意识、人格和个人行为的过程。其中尤以家庭文化环境、学校文化环境和社会文化环境对犯罪的影响最大。所以,必须优化各种文化环境,才能从根本上预防犯罪。     

Same Question,Different Answers: Theorizing Victim and Third Party Decisions to Report Crime to the Police

The current study attempts to address a key, but underdeveloped, area in crime reporting literature: the decisions of non-victims to report crime. Drawing on a theory of criminal justice decision-making, we argue that the decision to report a crime reflects a rational process, where the individual considers his or her goals, potential actions, and the relative ability of those actions to achieve the specified goals. Differences in each of these areas result in different decision-making processes for victims and third parties. We offer a preliminary test of our arguments using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. In general, we find support for our expectations, with third party reporting decisions more heavily influenced by crime seriousness and less so by the offender’s relationship with the victim than are victim reporting decisions. In concluding, we argue that third party reporters should be focal points of future reporting analyses.     

FEAR OF CRIME AND VICTIMIZATION AMONG THE ELDERLY IN DIFFERENT TYPES OF COMMUNITIES*

The central issue examined here is the effect that community setting, relative to other factors, has on victimization and fear of crime among the elderly. Findings are from 1,410 in-home interviews in two retirement communities (age homogeneous) and two age-heterogeneous communities. Victimization of elderly is low in all communities, and although nearly half of the respondents have some fear of crime, the percentage reporting great fear of crime is low. Victimization and fear of crime are only weakly related to one another, and the regression model for each does not account for much variance. But both are significantly related to the type of community, and fear of crime is also related to other variables. The greater the age density of the community (greater concentration of elderly), the less crime and less fear of crime. Living arrangements, sociodemographic variables, and health status of the elderly as indicators of personal vulnerability to crime are not related to victimization, but are related to fear of crime, and effects of community setting on fear of crime are reduced when these other variables are taken into account. Suggestions for other, unmeasured, sources of variations and implications for future research are presented.     

Intimidation and Street Gangs: Understanding the Response of Victims and Bystanders to Perceived Gang Violence

While research routinely examines the influence of gang membership on the quantity of violent crime involvement, less is known about the influence of gang violence on the situational characteristics of violent victimization. Felson’s discussion of street gangs highlights the possible functional role gang membership plays in the commission of violent crime; what he terms “the street gang strategy.” This study examines the functionality of gang membership during violent crimes by investigating the influence of perceived gang membership on the likelihood of victim resistance, bystander intervention, and police reporting using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Findings offer little support for the idea that gang members intimidate victims and bystanders to the extent that their behavior during and after violence differs systematically from responses resulting from non‐gang violence. Results are discussed in terms of their policy relevance and implications for future research.     

Area Differences and Time Trends in Crime Reporting: Comparing New York with Other Metropolitan Areas

Police measures of crime are shaped by victims’ decisions to notify the police. To obtain a better understanding of US crime trends, this study uses the National Crime Victimization Survey to examine geographic differences and temporal trends in crime reporting in New York and other metropolitan areas for the period 1979-2004. We find that net of crime characteristics and survey methodology, the New York metropolitan area showed fewer increases in crime reporting than did other metropolitan areas. These divergent trends suggest that the real differences in the drop of nonlethal violence between New York and other areas may have been smaller than those indicated by police-based crime statistics. We also find that from the early 1990s to 2004, New York showed a sharp decrease in the likelihood of victims perceiving that “police wouldn’t help.” This trend suggests that police reforms in New York City have not resulted in more victims using police-related reasons to explain their nonreporting behavior. Instead, researchers need to develop a broader theoretical framework (not an exclusive focus on police actions) to understand how police- and nonpolice-related factors may explain the geographic variation in the trends of reporting observed in this study.     

人身危险性在量刑中的思考

刑事古典学派认为惩罚犯罪就是惩罚犯罪行为,所以提出在量刑中主要考虑的是社会危害性的大小;而刑事人类学派和刑事社会学派注重对犯罪分子个体的研究,从犯罪个体中去研究惩罚的力度,在量刑的时候着重考察犯罪分子的人身危险性的大小.两者的争论由来已久,在中国的刑法理论界就是主要采取了刑事古典学派的观点,认为惩罚力度大小应该与罪行的大小相适应,造成的社会危害程度决定刑罚的轻重.那么对于犯罪分子的人身危险性在量刑时的作用究竟应该有多大呢?试从实践入手,针对我国现行法律的规定来阐述一下人身危险性在量刑中的作用,从而完善我国刑法的量刑原则.     

Fear of Gang Crime: A Look at Three Theoretical Models

Gang crime and resulting public fear became a major policy focus during the 1990s, yet few studies specifically focus on fear of gang crime. Guided by social disorganization theory, we test three theoretical models about the individual thought processes leading to fear of gang crime. Using structural equation models, we find that each of these three theories—diversity, disorder, and community concern—is an important predictor of gang-related fear. In addition, we find that the indirect relationships between demographic characteristics, theoretical variables, and fear depend upon which model is tested.