Michael Cherbonneau

Getting the Upper Hand: Scripts for Managing Victim Resistance in Carjackings

Increasing theoretical and empirical interest has turned to the process and dynamics of offender decision making and to how offenders commit discrete acts of crime. One outcome is attention to how offenders manage risks they view as significant. Here, the authors examine how carjackers script and manage victim resistance—the foremost obstacle in the accomplishment of robbery. Using semi-structured interviews with 30 carjackers, the authors explore their perspectives on the ramifications of victim resistance and their strategies to forestall and control it. The authors find that offenders are cognizant that resistance interferes with their goals and that mistakes in managing their victims not only lead to unsuccessful carjackings but also threaten their safety. Much of the scripting of criminal opportunity and the enactment of carjacking are explained, therefore, by strategies offenders use to minimize the chances that victims can resist. Discussion focuses on the implications of findings for theories of offender decision making.

MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF CARJACKING: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NEWSPAPER ARTICLES FROM 1993–2002

ABSTRACT Studies addressing media coverage of crime have concluded that newspapers devote inordinate attention to sensational crime events. This style of reporting has been attributed to the creation of moral panics. Recent media coverage of carjacking is explored to determine the types of carjackings that are reported on. To address this issue, a content analysis was performed on newspaper articles that described actual carjacking cases. The results of the present study suggest that Louisiana newspapers more often report on carjackings that involve injury to victims and offenders, especially those involving homicides, than on the typical carjacking as described in previous national, state, and city-specific carjacking research.

Managing Victim Confrontation: Auto Theft and Informal Sanction Threats

Objectives. This paper explores how offenders manage the prospect of victim confrontation during auto theft. Methods. Data were drawn from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 35 active offenders recruited from the streets of a large Midwestern US city using snowball sampling methods. Results. Two contextual domains figured prominently in the offenders’ decision-making calculus: The area around the target and the target itself. The first galvanized the offenders’ attention to, and management of, informal social control. The second enjoined offenders to balance speed and stealth in breaching the target. Conclusions. Victim confrontation is an informal sanction that is distinct from both retaliation and traditional extralegal sanctions. The rarity with which it occurs in auto theft is likely due to confrontation avoidance measures offenders adopt at the front end of the offense and during the enactment process itself. The conceptual implications of victim confrontation in crime are explored in relation to the following five areas: (1) sanction celerity and present orientation; (2) sanction certainty and ambiguity aversion; (3) sanction interdependence; (4) violence avoidance; and (5) directions for future research.

Nerve Management and Crime Accomplishment

Objective: To examine the theoretical import of nerve management for offender decision-making and crime accomplishment. Methods: Data were culled from in-depth, semistructured interviews with 35 active auto thieves. Results: Nerve management is best considered an intervening exercise in the threat perception process that moderates the fear-offending relationship through its effect on nervousness. Offenders draw from both cognitive and presentational tactics to this end. Such tactics include self-medication, shunting, fatalism, smoothness, and lens widening. Conclusions: Since nervousness is both caused by sanction threats and produces conduct that potentially neutralizes those threats, nerve management is best considered an agentic response that modifies the perception of risk itself.

Retaliatory Auto Theft

Drawing from a qualitative sample of active auto thieves, this article examines the moralistic underpinnings of auto theft. Our findings indicate that retaliatory auto theft is either direct or indirect. In direct forms of payback, auto theft reprises a specific violator for a specific affront, and the theft serves as that reprisal. In indirect payback, the target’s culpability is lacking: Auto theft either removes some generalized loss or facilitates a broader retributive objective secondary to the theft target. Discussion focuses on the distinction between revenge and retribution and how auto theft emerges as a feasible choice given the universe of available retaliatory options, and despite the longstanding preference among street offenders for violence.

Perceived Sanction Threats and Projective Risk Sensitivity: Auto Theft, Carjacking, and the Channeling Effect

Although sanction threats promote fear, among committed offenders, that fear can become a resource with which to sculpt emerging crime preferences. In such cases, criminality is not deterred but channeled. We explore the channeling process here as it relates to auto theft and carjacking. Our qualitative findings reveal that auto thieves are reluctant to embrace the violence of carjacking due to concerns over sanction threat severity they attributed to carjacking—both formal (higher sentences) and informal (victim resistance and retaliation). Meanwhile, the carjackers are reticent to enact auto theft because of the more uncertain and putatively greater risk of being surprised by victims, a fear that appears to overcome the enhanced long-term formal penalty of taking a vehicle by force. We examine the implications of offenders’ decision-making for the analytic intersection of rational choice and deterrence, offering the notion of projective risk sensitivity to encapsulate the process.