Risk Factors for Victimization and the Impact of Victim Status on Perceptions of Police Legitimacy in Australia

ABSTRACT

Previous research highlights that important differences exist between victim groups, but the impact victim status can have on perceptions of police legitimacy remains underexplored. The following paper contributes to this body of literature by utilizing the National Security and Preparedness Survey (NSPS, 2011–2012) to explore the risk/protective factors for victimization and differences between prejudice motivated crime (PMC) victims, non-PMC victims and non-victims in the Australian context, using Multinomial Logit Regression models. This study provides new insights into key differences between victim groups and perceptions of government and police legitimacy in the victimization context.

KEYWORDS:

• Victimization
• risk factors
• policing/law enforcement
• hate crimes

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the editors and reviewers for their considered comments and suggestions. I owe a debt of gratitude to my supervisory team Professor Lorraine Mazerolle, Dr. Suzanna Fay and Dr. Toby Miles-Johnson for their advice, assistance, and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to Mason and Dyer (2013), parallel crimes (p. 874) consist of comparable crimes that do not have the motive of prejudice, bias or hate. Lewis (2013) refers to parallel non-bias-motivated offenses (p. 57). I will refer to non-PMC in this context.

2. There was an oversample in the Australian Capital Territory. One underage respondent and one PMC victim supplying insufficient information were excluded from the survey data, resulting in a total sample of 4,256 people.

3. 244 people (or 5.73%) did not answer if they were a victim of a violent crime, compared to 286 (or 6.72%) who refused to indicate if they were victims of property crimes. 7 people (0.16%) did not indicate if the violent crime was due to prejudice, while 14 people (0.33%) did not indicate if the property crime was due to prejudice.

4. Coding note: Four respondents indicate experiencing both types of crime. When creating my PMC victim variable, these individuals were counted only once, reducing the number of PMC victims to a total of 46.

5. The NSPS used the following question to explore the marginalization and perception of isolation from the community: “How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement?” A factor analysis indicated that item (a) People in this community prefer that residents in the area are mostly Anglo Saxon and item (b) People in this community do not like having members of other ethnic groups as next door neighbors, loaded highly onto one factor.

6. For more detailed information about the demographic variables please refer to Wiedlitzka (2016).

7. I have run a separate factor analysis of items around the following attitudes: “People in this community prefer that residents in the area are mostly Anglo Saxon” (Q47a); “People in this community do not like having members of other ethnic groups as next door neighbours” (Q47b); “People in this community are comfortable with the current levels of ethnic diversity here” (Q47c; reverse-coded); “Some people in this community have been excluded from social events because of their skin colour, ethnicity, race or religion” (Q47d); “Within Australia, I see myself first and mainly as a member of my race/ethnic group” (Q47e); and “People from my race/ethnic group should try to keep a separate cultural identity” (Q47f), with an indication that only Q47a (0.7843) and Q47b (0.8198) load highly onto one factor displaying an Eigenvalue of 2.18712. The alpha of 0.8167 also indicates a good fit for a scale being over 0.7.

8. If the uniqueness score is high, then the variables do not explain the factor well.

9. This scale includes police legitimacy items as well as procedural justice items because of high loadings onto one factor during a factor analysis. Prior research also confirmed that there is a tendency for trust to load with procedural justice items (see Gau, 2011; Tankebe, 2013; Tankebe et al., 2016).

10. This study is an exploration of certain variables indicating a likelihood of being in one group over another, this does not indicate causality.

11. The perceptions of police legitimacy scale include procedural justice items, because the items load highly onto one factor and the two separate scales are highly correlated.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS) (ARC Grant SR0700002) that funded the National Security and Preparedness Survey. This article is part of a PhD thesis, which was supported by the ARC Linkage Project “Targeted Crime: Policing and Social Inclusion” (LP110100585).