City police and drunk driving: Baseline data

Public attitudes, social movement organizations, and criminal justice laws regarding drunk driving have undergone significant changes in recent years. These changes raise important questions about police, who act as gatekeepers for the rest of the criminal justice system. Very little, however, is known about what police did in the years when drunk driving was viewed as a less serious social problem or about what police do now. I attempt to answer the first of these questions using data collected in the early 1970s, an important, largely unexamined period in the history of city police and drunk driving. The data provide a baseline for contemporary research. City police did not give contacts with drunk drivers a high priority, preferred to avoid these encounters, and made arrests on the basis of both legal and extralegal factors; extralegal factors were more important than legal factors. I examine the implications of the baseline data for contemporary policing.     

Roadblocks and drunk driving: A time series analysis

Deterrence theory suggests that drunk driving can be reduced when the certainty of apprehension is improved. Sobriety checkpoints or roadblocks have been implemented in several jurisdictions to increase both the number of drunk drivers apprehended and the public’s perception of the risk of apprehension. The present study was conducted to obtain additional information on the effectiveness of such checkpoints as implemented in a medium sized urban community. A time series design consisting of 126 weeks of data was utilized to measure the impact of sobriety checkpoints on the number of alcohol related crashes. The research methods utilized, results obtained, and suggestions for further research are presented.     

The deterioration of deterrence effects of driving legislation: Have we been giving wrong signals to policymakers?

This paper suggests that the apparently observed initial success of legislation to control drunken driving accidents by law enforcement and sanctions, followed by a return of accident levels to initial trends may be an artifact of failure to properly model the accident process. The point is illustrated by simulating a model of accidents in which drunken driving is controllable with a change in laws. It shows that this control effect can easily be swamped by other plausible accident inducing forces. Finally, it is argued that the cost of failing to maintain efforts to control drunken driving may be greater than the social costs of maintaining high enforcement levels and stiff penalties.     

Perceptional foundations of deterrence: The case of prostitution

The authors conducted a survey to determine community perceptions about the certainty, celerity, and severity of punishment with regards to the crime of prostitution. A representative random sample of Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, North Carolina, was taken and 850 individuals responded. The results revealed that (1) citizens perceive sanctions against prostitution violations as being applied only infrequently; (2) most respondents perceive the time from violation to arrest as being relatively short but slower as the offenders proceed through the system, and (3) the severity of punishment is not perceived as being harsh. The authors argue that the low likelihood of apprehension, both actual and perceived, plus the mild sanctions may partially account for prostitution’s continued survival.     

The challenge of cyber attack deterrence

National security planners have begun to look beyond reactive, tactical cyber defense to proactive, strategic cyber defense, which may include international military deterrence. The incredible power of nuclear weapons gave birth to deterrence, a military strategy in which the purpose of armies shifted from winning wars to preventing them. Although cyber attacks per se do not compare to a nuclear explosion, they do pose a serious and increasing threat to international security. Real-world examples suggest that cyber warfare will play a lead role in future international conflicts. This article examines the two deterrence strategies available to nation-states (denial and punishment) and their three basic requirements (capability, communication, and credibility) in the light of cyber warfare. It also explores whether the two most challenging aspects of cyber attacks – attribution and asymmetry – will make cyber attack deterrence an impossible task.     

Studying the reach of deterrence: Can deterrence theory help explain police misconduct?

This article reports the first perceptual deterrence study of a sample of police officers. The study investigated the influence of traditional deterrence considerations, extralegal sanctions, and impulsivity on the intention to commit several hypothesized acts of police misconduct. The results were largely consistent with perceptual deterrence findings from samples of college students, experienced offenders, and corporate managers. In particular, this study found that both legal and extralegal sanction threats potentially deter police misconduct. Further, it found that impulsivity diminished the deterrent influence of both sanction forms. The study also found that some of the effects of the explanatory variables depended on whether officers had prior punishment experience. The article discusses the implications of its findings for combating police misconduct and for deterrence research generally.     

Plea bargaining and deterrence: An institutional approach

Previous economic analyses of plea bargaining have largely ignored its impact on the deterrence of crime. Instead, they have focused on the bargaining between a defendant and a prosecutor once a crime has been committed. This article remedies this deficiency by asking how the practice of plea bargaining influences the determination of criminal punishment and thereby the supply of crime by rational offenders. The key question examined is, how do the ex post objectives of prosecutors affect the ability of legislatures to implement criminal punishments aimed at achieving optimal deterrence? Various prosecutorial objectives are considered in answering this question.     

Correlates of deterrence: Problems of theory and method

A central methodological problem in ascertaining the correlates of deterrence is that there is no unambiguous method by which deterred persons can be identified. Assuming that the identification of a legal threat by persons who indicated that they have not committed a crime (the use of marijuana) is evidence of deterrence, this study differentiates deterred from undeterred persons based on a number of demographic variables. The results show that persons who were deterred from marijuana use by legal threats were indistinguishable on the basis of age, sex, race, marital status, and occupation from those who refrained from using marijuana for other reasons.     

The economics of environmental law enforcement: end-of-life vehicles

Abandoned End-of-Life Vehicles (ELVs) have been an environmental concern for a long time in a number of countries. This article examines different ways to address the issue by changing the incentive structure for agents. Following (Polinsky A. M., & Shavell, S. (2000). The Economic theory of public enforcement of law. Journal of Economic Literature, 38, 45–76.) a model is used to compare a fine-based system with a deposit-refund system; a combination of the two is then considered. It is shown that when the environmental harm is relatively low and constant, a deposit-refund system is preferred. When cases of high environmental harm are included, the optimal choice would be a combined system.      

Police patrol and the deterrence of crime

A nonrecursive model of the deterrent effect of police presence was formulated and tested for 26 cities. Victimization data were employed as measures of crime, unpublished FBI data on the number of police patrol units as the measure of levels of police presence, and data for 11 exogenous variables were derived from FBI and census reports. It was found that per capita, police are a positive function of rates of violent crime and that clearance rates are a positive function of police presence. However, some offenses that have traditionally been thought to be deterrable are not inversely related to clearance rates. The equations were re-estimated using official measures of crime and found to be more consistent with the deterrent hypothesis. It is suggested that official data may generate a spurious correlation. Finally, caution is suggested in consideration of alternative forms of police presence.     

Statistical measurement of the deterrence effect: A regression framework

When the dependent variable is a ratio, and its numerator also appears as the denominator of an explanatory variable, doubts exist with respect to the bias of the estimated effect. Although the problem arises in many contexts, it is posed here in the context of estimating the deterrence effect of punishment on crime. This is the context in which Logan (1978) suggests the method of “part-correlation.” By expressing this method in a regression framework, the results of the analysis of specification error are drawn upon to simplify Logan's procedure, proper measures are derived, and results are generalized. Finally, the effects of measurement errors are introduced and the bias examined.     

The fairness of sanctions: some implications for optimal enforcement policy

In this article we incorporate notions of the fairness of sanctionsinto the standard model of public enforcement. When both theprobability and magnitude of sanctions may be varied, the usualsolution involves a very high sanction and a relatively lowprobability of enforcement if individuals are risk neutral.When the issue of fairness is added to the analysis, the optimalsanction generally is not extremely high because such a sanctionwould be seen as unfair. The optimal probability of imposingsanctions may be higher than in the usual case (to offset thelower sanction) or lower than in the usual case (because thelower sanction reduces the effectiveness of enforcement).     

The organizational values of law enforcement agencies: The impact of field training officers in the socialization of police recruits to law enforcement organizations

This article examines how the values communicated by Field Training Officers (FTOs) influence the behaviors of police recruits to conform to the norms of the police culture. Analysis and interpretation of the written responses of police recruits to a program evaluation form in a police department located in the western United States were used to identify the explicit and implicit values that were communicated during the Field Training Program (FTP). The findings of this study indicated that although positive explicit values were communicated during the FTP, several potentially negative implicit values were also communicated to police recruits. Consequently, the perceived status of the FTO is an important factor in police recruits learning job-related values. Recommendations are made for developing effective leadership strategies for bringing greater levels of congruency between the explicit and implicit values of law enforcement organizations that are communicated to police recruits during the training process and organizational socialization. Author Note: Wade Engelson is a lieutenant with the Fresno Police Department. He has been with the department for 12 years and is currently assigned as the Commander of the Special Investigations Bureau. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business/Economics and a Master’s degree in Public Administration from California State University, Fresno. He holds a Doctorate in Educational Leadership from the University of California, Davis/California State University, Fresno Joint Doctoral Program. He has taught in a variety of settings and has published articles in the fields of sexual harassment, organizational socialization, tactics, and training issues. His research interests include leadership issues, organizational socialization, and the hidden curriculum of organizations.     

Information,apprehension, and deterrence: Exploring the limits of police productivity

The capacity of police departments to solve crimes and apprehend offenders is low for many types of crime, particularly crimes of profit. This article reviews a variety of studies of police apprehension and hypothesizes that an important determinant of the ability of the police to apprehend criminals is information. The complete absence of information for many types of crime places fairly clear upper bounds on the ability of the police to effect solutions.To discover whether these boundaries are high or low we analyzed data from the 1973 National Crime Panel about the types and amount of information potentially available to police through victim reports and patrol activities. The evidence suggests that if the police rely on information made readily available to them, they will never do much better than they are doing now. On the other hand, there appears to be more information available to bystanders and passing patrols than currently is being used, which suggests that surveillance strategies and improved police methods for eliciting, recording, and analyzing information supplied by victims and witnesses might increase the probability of solving crimes and making arrests. In light of this we review a few possibly helpful innovations suggested in the literature on police productivity and procedure.