RT Article
T1 Bringing Crime Back In: Toward a Better Understanding of Police Arrest Decisions
JF Journal of research in crime and delinquency
VO 33
IS 3
SP 333
OP 336
A1 Klinger, David A.
LA English
YR 1996
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1639660399
AB The article comments on a study published in the August 1996 issue of the "Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency" on suspects' demeanor and its impact on police action. The "discovery" that police officers did not fully enforce the criminal law coincided with the arrival of the conflict perspectives on the criminological scene. This happenstance had a tremendous impact on the social scientific search for understanding of how and why the police actually exercise their arrest powers. The core claim of conflict and labeling theories-that extralegal considerations play a pivotal role in the operation of formal social control-led police researchers to focus their hunt for the determinants of arrest on factors other than criminal conduct. The recent studies add substantially to our meager knowledge about the crime-arrest link by demonstrating that crime plays a far bigger role in arrest decisions than previous research had indicated. Recent research indicates that, by bringing crime back in as a central variable in the study of arrest, future research can provide a clearer picture of the relative effects of crime and extralegal variables. Such a development would increase substantially our understanding of police arrest decisions
K1 Polizeibeamte
K1 Polizeiliche Festnahme
K1 Einflussfaktoren
K1 Verdachtsstrategien
K1 Polizeieinsatz
K1 Verhalten Betroffener