Victim's perceptions of initial police responses to robbery and aggravated assault: Does race matter? |
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Authors: | Ronet Bachman |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware, 322 E. L. Smith Hall, 19716 Newark, Delaware |
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Abstract: | Despite the fact that police officers are usually the first persons within the criminal justice system to respond to a criminal
victimization, the majority of research investigating racial discrimination within the system has examined primarily the effects
of race on adjudication outcomes which occur after initial police interventions, such as conviction decisions and sentences.
Very little empirical effort has been devoted to examining the effects of race on early police responses to a reported victimization.
Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey from 1987 to 1992, this paper investigates the effects of both the
victim's and the offender's race on three police responses to robbery and aggravated assault: (1) police response time to
the scene, (2) effort exerted by the police at the scene, and (3) likelihood of arrest. It was found that police were quicker
to respond and also exerted more effort at the scene such as searching and taking evidence to incidents of black on white
robbery compared to all other racial dyads. This relationship held even after controlling for other factors such as victim-offender
relationship, poverty, injury to the victim, and victim's gender. No significant effects of race, however, were found when
predicting the probability of arrest in cases of robbery. The effects of race on police responses to aggravated assault were
more complicated. For assaults involving strangers, police were significantly more likely to exert additional effort at the
scene if the victim was white and the offender was perceived to be black. This effect was reversed, however, for nonstranger
assault victimizations. Police were significantlyless likely to exert effort at the scene or to make an arrest in black on white assaults involving nonstrangers. The most consistent
predictors of arrest in both stranger and nonstranger assault victimizations were police response time, injury to the victim,
and the incident occurring in a public setting. |
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Keywords: | victim's perceptions police response race victimization data |
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