Contacting the police for assistance: findings from a sample of undocumented Latino immigrants

ABSTRACT

Victims’ decisions to call the police for assistance have been examined to date primarily from the perspective of U.S. citizens. We still know little about factors that influence decisions of undocumented immigrants to contact the police. Using data from a survey of undocumented Latino immigrants who were victimized in property and person offenses, this study examined the association between experiences during police stops and the likelihood of calling the police for help. Results showed a higher likelihood of contacting the police for assistance among respondents who had experienced police stops in the United States, regardless of the cause of their stop(s) or the police demeanor. However, when disaggregating respondents into subgroups, the study found a low rate of calling police for help among respondents who had negative experiences negative during police stops. The policy implications of the findings are presented.

KEYWORDS:

• Undocumented immigrants
• victimization
• decision to call the police for help

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A supplementary analysis on the link between multiple victimization incidents and the likelihood to call the police was conducted (Appendix A). Due to the small number of respondents who experienced 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 incidents, the data did not provide solid statistical power to conduct Poisson regression analysis. Thus, a frequency analysis was utilized for this inquiry (see Appendix A). There is a trend that the more counts of victimization incidents, the higher the rate of calling the police.

2. Hate crime and sexual assault were not kept as separate categories because of the large missing rate in respondents’ answers in related questions. For example, 64 of the 280 respondents did not answer the question related hate crime victimization. The ‘experiencing other types of crime’ category included hate crime, sexual assault, and attempted assault and robbery.

3. Among all the 233 respondents who never been stopped by the police, 15% of them decided to call the police when needed assistance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lin Liu

Lin Liu, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University. Her research interests center around policing, victimization, offender rehabilitation, and quantitative methods. Recent publications appear in Crime & Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, Criminal Justice Policy Review, Women & Criminal Justice, The Prison Journal, Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, Social Science Research, Marquette Law Review, Contemporary Justice Review, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, and Sociological Inquiry.