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Disentangling the Crime-arrest Relationship: The Influence of Social Context

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Abstract

Drawing on the economic and conflict perspectives of crime control, as well as insights from the tipping effect literature, the present investigation examines the extent to which the social context within which potential offenders operate tempers the macro-level, reciprocal relationship between crime and arrests. We use autoregressive integrated moving average techniques to assess the extent to which the April 2001 race-related riot in Cincinnati, Ohio conditions the reciprocal relationship between property crime and arrests for the entire city and disaggregated by police district. Consistent with a majority of prior longitudinal studies, our analyses for the entire length of the times series reveal no evidence of an association between our measures of crime and arrest, regardless of the level of spatial aggregation. In contrast to the results from our baseline models, the post-riot transfer function models indicate that there is a reciprocal association between crime and arrests that is contingent upon the social context. The implications of our findings for the further study of the reciprocal relationship between crime and arrests are discussed.

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Notes

  1. We also prefer to examine property, rather than personal, offenses to evaluate predictions derived from the racial conflict perspective. Our reasoning is twofold.

    The vast majority of personal offenses (homicide, rape, and assault) are intra-racial (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1973–2006, 2005). For white offenders this means that their victims are also of a similar (high) social status. Thus, based on the racial threat hypothesis, there is no substantive reason for anticipating that the April 2001 riot would lead to any increase in the level of personal arrests in the predominately white areas of the city (districts two through five). There is second characteristic of personal crimes that makes them a less than optimal choice for the assessment of racial conflict theory, especially the benign neglect hypothesis. To recap, the benign neglect hypothesis anticipates finding a negative association between crimes and arrests in predominately black areas of the city after the April 2001 riot so that the police could devote their limited resources to and protect the interests of a more powerful, white majority (Liska and Chamlin 1984). Note, however, that most members of society, independent of their position in the social structure, agree that personal crimes, particularly those involving bodily harm, are inherently more serious than those involving the mere loss of property (Kwan et al. 2002; Rossi et al. 1974; Stylianou 2003; Wolfgang et al. 1985). Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude that the police have much less (if any) discretion to alter their enforcement practices with respect to personal than for (less serious) property offenses in response to the April 2001 riot.

  2. It should be noted that time series can either drift (require seaonal and/or nonseasonal differencing to make them stationary in their levels) or trend (require the specification of a constant). In practice, most crime-related time series drift.

  3. While the post-riot effect of arrests on crime might be due, at least in part, to the incapacitation of property offenders, the available evidence is far from conclusive. Langan and Levin’s (2002) analyses of 1994 recidivism data from fifteen states (including Ohio) indicate that the probability that a property offender will be rearrested within 3 years exceeds seventy percent. However, a recent assessment of the Hamilton county (Cincinnati) jail indicates that property offenders make-up less than quarter of the total pre-trial detainees. Further, the proportion of pre-trial detainees for property offenses has remained stable or declined slightly from 1999 through 2004 (Tombs et al. 2006). Thus, it seems unlikely that the pretrial incarceration of property offenders could account for the post-riot effect of property arrests on property crimes.

  4. We would like to thank anonymous reviewers and the editors for recommending that we examine the possibility that our findings are due to the incapacitation of repeat offenders rather than the deterrence of profit-maximizing offenders.

  5. Although this has no bearing on the relative merits of the incapacitation and deterrence hypotheses, the cross correlational analyses indicate that there is a instantaneous, positive association between assaultive behavior and assaults. While one cannot determine empirically the causal direction of a cross correlation function at lag 0, logic suggests to use that crime is the “causal” variable. If such is the case, this would lend further credence to the contention that the police have less flexibility in their responses to personal, than property offenses (see note 1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210389, Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0389, USA

    Mitchell B. Chamlin & Andrew J. Myer

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  1. Mitchell B. Chamlin
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  2. Andrew J. Myer
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Correspondence to Mitchell B. Chamlin.

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Chamlin, M.B., Myer, A.J. Disentangling the Crime-arrest Relationship: The Influence of Social Context. J Quant Criminol 25, 371–389 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-009-9072-z

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