Imminent Capture and Noncompliance: Probing Deterrence in Extreme Environments

Abstract

Understanding how deterrence operates under extreme conditions is both elusive and important. Studying suspect noncompliance in the form of flight during police-involved vehicle chases provides the opportunity to do this. These are crimes where the certainty of detection could not be higher, yet noncompliance is the end result and arguably comes because of the enhanced sanction risk rather than the obverse (deterrence) or in spite of it (defiance). Drawing from a qualitative sample of 25 auto thieves who have fled from the police, we explore their pre-chase perceptions, their motives for flight, and their decision-making processes during flight to probe the theoretical boundaries of perceptual deterrence. To this end, we pay particular attention to the mediating role of ambiguity aversion and belief updating in reconciling two seemingly inconsistent theoretical perspectives: risk framing and rational choice.

Keywords:

• Decision making
• noncompliance
• perceptual deterrence
• police pursuit
• risk perceptions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Richard Wright for his assistance and collaboration at various stages of the grant-writing and research process that resulted in the data used in this article. We also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms.

Notes

1 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this cogent insight.

2 Actually, we interviewed 35 auto thieves for the larger project; however, 10 are excluded here due to missing or insufficient information about their involvement in fleeing from authorities, or because they reported having no personal involvement with being chased and instead discussed police pursuits in purely hypothetical terms.

3 The relative efficacy of the tactics presented here was less our concern than offenders’ perceptions of what they thought worked (Cherbonneau & Copes, 2006). In some incidents the strategies they employed assisted in their escape while in others, it was clear that the strategies are what got them caught (e.g. speeding or dangerous driving led them to wreck at which point they were arrested).

4 Because our main interest was on motor vehicle theft and because respondents were selected for their involvement in car stealing not eluding, most of the pursuits they described involved stolen cars. We cannot provide a relative frequency of the degree to which fleeing took place in stolen cars versus other offenses. Offenders’ overemphasis on pursuits involving stolen vehicles may well be an artifact of the purposive sampling strategy used here. Moreover, we do not know if respondents always fled for other such offenses but as best we could tell from this sub-sample, they always fled in stolen cars. The bottom line is that we do not have enough data to specify potential differences in decision-making among the various precursors for flight.

5 The question of role (driver versus passenger) for all pursuits in which offenders were involved was not always collected. Nearly all reported taking on the role as the driver in the pursuits they did describe. At least eight respondents said they had been the driver in some pursuits and the passenger in others. In some cases, roles were multifaceted. For example, one offender described a pursuit that began with him as a passenger but midway through the chase he took over driving duties. For at least three individuals, as best we could tell, they only provided data from the perspective of passenger. Their role as co-conspirators percipient to the structure, process, and enactment of flight keeps them relevant—“egging” drivers on about what to do, where to go, or at minimum, influencing their real-time decisions.

6 It certainly is conceivable that dislike of the police could drive the decision to flee, but our reading of the data suggests that this motive was secondary at best. We could say the same for the role of respect/status in evasion. Although flight may promote esteem among one’s peers, sanction avoidance was the overriding objective (and would be regardless since failure to evade police will likely pose a detriment to one’s reputation). Offenders didn’t need police pursuits in order to enhance status; a stolen car can serve much of that purpose on its own, and most offenders tried to avoid police pursuits when possible.

7 Some offenders are sufficiently adept at stealing cars as to leave no obvious signs of theft (Cherbonneau & Copes, 2006; Copes & Cherbonneau, 2006).

8 To be sure, it is not our intention to conflate heuristic-based “resetting effects” with Bayesian or related models of belief updating. Nor is it to imply that both models are compatible, because they are not (Matsueda et al., 2006). Rather, we simply wish to recognize that perceptions have undergone updating and that change is in immediate response to new information (i.e. punishment or punishment avoidance) regardless of whether perceptions are adjusted in a direction that is consistent (Bayesian) or inconsistent (resetting) with the new information.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported here was funded by the University of Missouri Research Board. Points of view or opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agency.

Notes on contributors

Michael Cherbonneau

Michael Cherbonneau is an assistant professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of North Florida. His research interests lie in the theoretical and empirical understanding of crime and offenders with an emphasis on decision-making and foreground influences on offending.

Bruce A. Jacobs

Bruce A. Jacobs is a professor of Criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas. He studies offender decision-making.