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Abstract
Research on factors that influence police discretion usually focuses on individual or situational characteristics (e.g., an officer or citizen's age, race or gender, or the seriousness of the incident). In contrast, this study examines whether characteristics of places influence police decisions to “upgrade” or “downgrade” their response to incidents. Earlier research is expanded in three ways: first, rather than examining an isolated decision within the series of decisions that make up an incident, a series of chronological decisions within a “decision‐making pathway” is derived and analyzed. Second, multiple categories of racial and ethnic composition of places and their influence on police decision‐making pathways are examined. Third, decision pathways of a variety of incidents at small geographic places are compared across an entire jurisdiction. Findings indicate that, even when controlling for the level of violence, places with a greater proportion of Black or wealthy residents significantly influence officers' decisions to downgrade crime classifications and actions taken on incidents reported to the police.
Acknowledgments
This study was sponsored and funded through the 2007–2008 National Institute of Justice W.E.B. DuBois Fellowship (2007‐IJ‐CX‐0032). The author wishes to acknowledge Karen Jensenius, George Fachner, Julie Willis, Cody Telep, Brittany Davenport, Troy Payne, and Julie Wan for their research assistance and editing as well as members of NIJ and the anonymous reviewers who have offered helpful comments in improving this study.
Notes
1. Mastrofski, Reisig, and McCluskey (Citation2002) and Reisig, McCluskey, Mastrofski, and Terrill (Citation2004) also found that although not as powerful as individual factors, neighborhood disadvantage was still a significant predictor of police officer behavior toward suspects.
2. The Census defines linguistic isolation as a situation in which every adult in a household speaks a language other than English, and no adult speaks English “very well” (Seigel, Martin, & Bruno, Citation2001).
3. Additionally, the author was interested in the effects of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on police decision‐making related to race. These findings will be reported in a separate article.
4. In many cases, the record in the database indicated “duplicate” or “unknown,” where no information including address or nature of the call was provided, nor did an officer respond. These were removed.
5. In this database, I was unable to discern whether initial calls for service labeled as “TRAFFIC” were traffic stops, parking tickets, or reports of accidents in which police did not respond. Because of the generic label in the calls for service database, this posed problems with the development of the decision pathways (as discussed shortly), which required a general determination of the seriousness of the offense. Thus, “TRAFFIC” could include a fender‐bender for which no police action was initiated, or a driving‐while‐intoxicated and hit‐and‐run incidents in which someone had been seriously injured. Because of this, traffic‐denoted incidents will be analyzed in a separate study if more information can be obtained about them.
6. This complication was pointed out by one of the anonymous reviewers. Unfortunately, in this data, officer‐initiated calls are not distinguishable from civilian‐initiated calls.
7. Space does not permit all of the graphs and maps of each distribution of every score to be included in this article, but the full report of this project is available upon request from National Institute of Justice.
9. See http://geodatacenter.asu.edu/.
10. Studies have indicated interactive and moderating effects between neighborhood racial composition, socioeconomic characteristics, and policing outcomes (Terrill & Reisig, Citation2003; Weitzer, Citation1999; Wu et al., Citation2009). Although the author has found evidence that racial composition is not significantly related to spatial densities of violence and drug offenses in this same jurisdiction, this public perception is undoubtedly strong. To test for this possibility, two interaction terms were added between the proportion of the block group population that was Black and the proportion that was living in poverty as well as between % Black and the violent crime rate. Both proved non‐significant to the calculation of all models.
11. See https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/background/index.jsp. An anonymous peer reviewer suggested the use of this test, with which the author agrees could be useful.