Police Comfort and Victims

Abstract

Research has shown that the nature of interactions with police can impact victim recovery from trauma, satisfaction with police, and cooperation within the criminal justice system. However, evaluations of police effectiveness often view crime prevention as the “bottom line” for successful policing while overlooking the socioemotive factors that are actually important to victims. Drawing on the attributional and blaming literature for conceptual guidance, the present research examines 1,865 police-victim encounters from a large-scale observational study in an attempt to better understand the relationship between victim characteristics and police comforting behavior. The findings indicate that a number of factors affect the likelihood of whether comfort will be offered by police officers to victims. More specifically, female and middle- to upper-class victims were more likely to be comforted by police officers, as were those exhibiting signs of injury or depression. However, those encounters involving officers with a college degree or more years of work experience were less likely to involve comforting behavior. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.

This article is based on data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods, supported by Grant No. 95-IJ-CX-0071 by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Keywords:

• police
• victims
• comfort
• blaming
• observational

Notes

This article is based on data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods, supported by Grant No. 95-IJ-CX-0071 by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

1. Used by Glauser and Tullar (1985) to describe informal, supportive, and emotional verbal communications, “socioemotive” in the present article refers to informal, supportive, and emotional behaviors conducted by police. Offering comfort, reassurance, physical assistance, or a listening ear are examples of such behavior.

2. The term “victim characteristics” is used in a broad sense to reflect both demographic characteristics (e.g., age, sex, race) and dispositional characteristics (e.g., intoxication, mental illness, depression).

3. Stewart and Maddren (1997) note that sex, crime type, and relationship to the offender may have been confounded in their own study (e.g., one scenario involved two brothers and the other a married couple). Aramburu and Leigh (1991) also note that victim sex and relationship to the aggressor were confounded in their study, which may have influenced the results.

4. Notably, when all three blame types were examined, the female robbery victim received significantly more blame in the hitchhiking situation only for characterological and global blame. Male robbery victims received the highest level of behavioral blame (Howard, 1984b, p. 501). Both of these results are consistent with the pattern of nonsexual assault victims receiving more blame than sexual assault victims.

5. These two studies used adaptations of the same scenario in which provocation was defined by behaviors that might be interpreted as provoking violence, such as name calling, nagging, or spending time with a male friend (Kristiansen & Giulietti, 1990; Pavlou & Knowles, 2001). Kristiansen and Giulietti (1990, p. 188) are careful to note that these behaviors do not, in fact, provoke or justify violence, but that violence is something that is inflicted on the victim.

6. In addition to black and white, POPN researchers also captured Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, and an “other” category, but these latter four only accounted for 58 of 1,865 cases (3.1%), thereby offering little variation. As such, these cases were classified under the nonwhite category.

7. Wealth was originally captured by POPN researchers as a four-category ordinal variable that included the general categories of chronic poverty, low, middle, and above-middle. However, victim wealth was almost entirely concentrated in the low and middle classes, with 42.8% and 55.0% of cases falling into those two categories alone. Thus, this variable was dichotomized by linking chronic poverty with low wealth and middle with above-middle wealth.

8. Officer assignment with respect to being assigned either community policing or 911 call response duties was also originally part of the inquiry. However, preliminary analysis demonstrated that this variable and the site variable posed multi-collinearity problems. As a result, the assignment measure is not examined in the following models.

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