PRIVATE JUSTICE SYSTEMS AND CRIME REPORTING

The burgeoning need for private police to complement the activities of public police has added a new dimension to issues of reliability and validity of official statistics. For purposes of this study. shoplifting data generated by the private police sector were gathered from matched pairs of retail stores. The findings showed significant differences between stores by age and gender. Partitioning of contingency tables to localize the association to a particular category produced no systematic conclusions between the matched pairs of stores or among the full range of sampled stores. Differential law enforcement exercised by an untrained and unregulated private police force calls into question the concept of justice and the guarantees of due process.