Re: Police stops, race, crime rates, arrest rates

[lbo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

At 02:20 PM 3/4/2005, Bill Lear wrote:

> How have laws changed to perhaps direct law enforcement to treat the
> groups differently?
>
>
> Bill


Can't answer your last question. However, you can start by taking a look at
the Uniform Crime Reports at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm

Most Crim textbooks will introduce a discussion of race and crime by
pointing out that UCR arrest data are clearly a reflection of police
practices. It's well-known that they are highly political. A politician who
wants to make it appear that a tough on crime stance worked might encourage
the police to, not just crack down on crime, but report it in such a way
that more crimes are reported. In the past (and I'm sure this is fudged
today), police might report several instances of crime when busting a
barroom brawl whereas before, they filled out the paperwork in a hurry and
just didn't report _all_ the crimes, just ones they thought were most
important. When the politician decides it's a good time to make it appear
that the policy worked, police are instructed to report fewer arrests, even
though the number actually stayed largely the same.

There was actually some famous instance of this--occured in NYC as I
recall, perhaps Carrol might remember. Indeed, the Uniform in the UCR is an
attempt to get rid of that kind of reporting bias, forcing police depts
across the nation to uniformly report crime for improved comparative stats.

Of couse, we also know that crime rates are affected by heightened
attention to crime itself. By analogy, it feels as if plagiarism is
increasing. But is that the case? Or, could university demands that profs
pay more attention to teaching simply step up the attention paid to
plagiarism. Might not be happening much more than it ever did, it's just
that more people are noticing than ever.

The other way criminologist try to eliminate bias in the UCR is to verify
the stats against the NCVS (Crime Victims Survey)and self-report data. The
NCVS provides data from victime of rape, assult, and robbery, recording the
victims' observation of the race of the attacker. The comparison reveals
that, while there's a consistency, there's still a discrepancy, with crime
victims reporting fewer black attackers than the arrest data in the UCR.
The discrepency is glaring in the case of rape, which suggests a couple of
things:

1. racism and sexism are integrally related.
2. police may be using rape crimes to arrest anyone vulnerable to the
charge -- and that vulnerability, of course, is bound up with racism in the
CJ system and among jurors.

[I think #2 is pretty important and, although I never carried out this
research, it's not really my field, it came to my attention that police
have taken advantage of heightened awareness of domestic violence issues.
They portray themselves as being helpful, and perhaps they really mean it,
but what they are also after is another arrest or two. Gaining access to a
home, under the pretense of 'helping' a reluctant victim, is one way to do
it. They search the home for the suspect and use that access to look for
evidence of other crimes: guns, drugs, stolen goods, etc. Though I haven't
watched it in awhile, you can see how these biases play out in crime shows
like COPS where offenders of this type of crime are nearly always portrayed
as poor and pathological.

And right now, it irritates me. As I type, my son's gf is saying "bye". She
stayed the night because her father was on a rampage and she couldn't bear
it anymore. I won't go into details, suffice it to say: her family would
_never_ be on COPS, let alone be subjected to a police search in an effort
to find evidence of other crimes.]

Finally, self report data are another way to check bias in the UCR. Large
national sample of youth from the Institute for Social Research reveal that
self-reports of criminal behavior and what they call 'deliquincy' are lower
than whites. This could be that it actually _is_ the case and/or that
whites feel much more comfortable telling researchers about their
criminal/deliquent behavior. In either case, racism is surely at work.

More anon. I will check with fellow sociologists who specialize in this
field. I just gave you a nickel tour. :)


--

http://www.inkworkswell.com

"Be a scribe! Your body will be sleek, your hand
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copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer.
Happy is  the heart of him who writes; he is young
each day."

                 --Ptahhotep, Vizier to Isesi,
                   Fifth Egyptian Dynasty, 2300 BC