Wesley G. Skogan

Asymmetry in the Impact of Encounters with Police

This article examines the impact of personal experience on popular assessments of the quality of police service. Following past research, it addresses the influence of personal and neighbourhood factors on confidence in the police. It then focuses on the additional impact of positive and negative personal experiences with the police. Several studies of police encounters with the public have noted that the relationship between how people recall being treated and their general confidence in the police may be asymmetrical. At its worst, the police may get essentially no credit for delivering professional service, while bad experiences can deeply influence peoples’ views of their performance and even legitimacy. This proposition is tested using survey data on police-initiated and citizen-initiated contacts with police in Chicago. The findings indicate that the impact of having a bad experience is four to fourteen times as great as that of having a positive experience, and the coefficients associated with having a good experience—including being treated fairly and politely, and receiving service that was prompt and helpful—were not statistically different from zero. Another section of the article replicates this finding using surveys of residents of seven other urban areas located in three different countries. The article concludes that this is bad news indeed for police administrators intent on solidifying their support among voters, taxpayers and the consumers of police services.

The Impact of Victimization on Fear

This report examines the relationship between criminal victimization and fear of crime. Past research has been surprisingly inconclusive about this issue, and some peoples fears have been branded “irrational” because the two did not appear to be tightly linked. However, the data analyzed here indicate that victimization affects both fear-related attitudes and behavior in a clear and consistent manner. This report also suggests that the impact of victimization is relatively uniform. Some research has indicated that certain groups are especially affected by crime, a claim that might be used to justify special treatment for selected victims and has been used to support demands for special “treatment” of selected offenders. However, the strong effects of victimization registered in these data were not differentially distributed across subgroups. In sum, most people do learn from their experiences, although other kinds of learning are rational as well.

Reporting Crimes to the Police: The Status of World Research:

Since the mid-1960s there has been a great deal of interest around the world in the use of sample surveys of the general population to study crime. The advantages of doing so have been discussed in detail many times (National Research Council, 1976; Biderman, 1967). Crime surveys have been conducted in many nations, a practice that is continuing despite their heavy cost. Large-scale national surveys have been conducted in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, Great Britain, and Sweden. Smaller but regular national studies have been carried out in the rest of Scandinavia, and there has been a national survey in Spain. There have been large surveys of victimization in individual cities in Germany, Switzerland, and England. Statistics Canada has completed very large studies of seven major cities, including two surveys of Vancouver, and the Israeli Census Bureau has added victimization questions to a national survey. In addition, small but useful city studies have been conducted in Mexico, Colombia, Israel, and Belgium. The four islands that make up the Dutch Antilles also have been surveyed. The findings of these surveys have accumulated to the point where it is possible to perceive cross-national regularities—or clear inconsistencies—in what they reveal.

Citizen Satisfaction with Police Encounters

This article examines the character and consequences of encounters between police and residents of the city of Chicago. It describes the frequency with which they contacted the police for assistance or support and how often they were stopped by them. Follow-up questions gathered information about the character of those contacts. The analysis contrasts the effects of experiential, on-scene factors with those of race, age, gender, and language on satisfaction with encounters. It demonstrates the great importance of the quality of routine police-citizen encounters, for things that officers did on the spot dominated in determining satisfaction. The personal characteristics of city residents played an important role in shaping who was treated in this way or that and affected satisfaction primarily through on-scene actions by police.

Winning the Hearts and Minds of Police Officers: An Assessment of Staff Perceptions of Community Policing in Chicago

The success of community policing depends on the police officers who are responsible for implementing the programs. In essence, their attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors must be substantially changed before community policing can be put into practice. Chicagos community policing program, known as CAPS, became operational in March 1993 in five prototype districts. Before the program strated, officers were surveyed about their job satisfaction, their supervisors, and their opinions regarding community policing. Results showed that officers were very ambivalent about CAPS. They were supportive of some CAPS-related activities (e.g., solving noncrime problems), but not others (e.g., foot patrol), and were dubious about the programs effects on crime and neighborhood relations.

Why reforms fail

Police reform is risky and hard, and efforts to innovate in policing often fall short of expectations. This chapter examines sources of resistance to change in policing. Some are internal, including opposition to reform at virtually all levels of the organization and among special units. The position of unions vis-a-vis change is highly variable, particularly if proposals do not threaten working conditions and officer safety. Politicians and other potential opponents of change lurk in the vicinity of policing, and reformers need to bring them into the process as well. The public must understand how the investment they have in policing will be enhanced, and not threatened, by reform. If new strategies require the cooperation of other service agencies (as, for example, for problem-solving policing) the heads of those bureaucracies must understand they are partners in their citys program, not victims of empire building by the police. At the top, city leaders must match the commitment of chiefs and other police executives to change, if reforms are to survive leadership transition.

Dimensions of the Dark Figure of Unreported Crime

A great deal of criminal activity in America goes unrecorded, largely because it is not reported to the police. This pool of unrecorded crime has several consequences: it limits the deterrent capability of the criminal justice system, it contributes to the misallocation of police resources, it renders victims ineligible for public and private benefits, it affects insurance costs, and it helps shape the police role in society. This report examines these problems in light of new crime-victim data gathered in a national sample of the general population. The data suggest that, compared with those incidents which were reported to the police, the reservoir of unreported crime contains a disproportionate number of less serious incidents involving small financial loss, little serious injury, and less use of weapons. Race, in particular, was unrelated to the reporting of crime in the United States in 1973.

Measurement problems in official and survey crime rates

Abstract This paper analyzes sources of error in the two major methods we use to measure crime in America—official police statistics and victimization surveys. The two produce quite different pictures of the volume and distribution of crime, but it is not clear that this is because victim-based statistics are “accurate.” Each measurement procedure has its characteristic errors, some of which it shares with the other. Comparisons of official and survey data on crime are helpful in revealing the dimensions of these error terms, and they point out the analyses which must be conducted if we are to specify their exact proportions.

Concern About Crime and Confidence in the Police Reassurance or Accountability

This article examines the relationship between confidence in the police and concern about crime. A large body of research on opinions about police treats confidence in the police as a dependent variable that is influenced by assessments of neighborhood conditions. These studies argue that people hold police accountable for local crime, disorder, and fear. Another large body of literature on public perceptions of crime treats concern about crime as a dependent variable that is influenced by confidence in the police. This research stresses the reassurance effects of policing. Taken as a whole, these studies thus assume contradictory causal orderings of these two correlated factors. It is also possible that the relationship between the two is instead reciprocal, with confidence and concern affecting each other, but this possibility has never been tested. This article addresses this central theoretical ambiguity in research on public perceptions, using panel data and structural modeling to identify the most plausible causal ordering of concern about crime and confidence in police. The findings support the reassurance model: reductions in concern about crime flow from increasing confidence in the police, while an accountability link from concern about crime to confidence in the police was much weaker and not statistically significant.

Communities, Crime, and Neighborhood Organization

It is widely believed that voluntary action by neighborhood residents can play an important role in maintaining order. However, the ability of individuals to act in defense of their community is constrained by the opportunities for action that are available to them. Participation in collective efforts against crime is confined to places where the existence of local organizations makes that possible. The distribution of group activity across the metropolitan landscape thus defines the “opportunity structure” for local collective action. This article examines the impact of serious crime, the economic and social resources residents have to draw upon to deal with neighborhood problems, and their characteristic relationships with the police, upon those opportunities to participate in organized efforts to combat crime.