It All Just Piles Up: Challenges to Victim Credibility Accumulate to Influence Sexual Assault Case Processing.

The underreporting of sexual assault is well known to researchers, practitioners, and victims. When victims do report, their complaints are unlikely to end in arrest or prosecution. Existing research on police discretion suggests that the police decision to arrest for sexual assault offenses can be influenced by a variety of legal and extra-legal factors particularly challenges to victim credibility. Although extant literature examines the effects of individual behaviors on police outcomes, less is known about how the accumulation of these behaviors, attributions, and characteristics affects police decision making. Using data collected from the Los Angeles Police Department and Sheriff's Department, we examine one police decision point-the arrest to fill this gap in the literature. First, we examine the extent to which the effects of potential challenges to victim credibility, based on victim characteristics and behaviors, influence the arrest decision, and next, how these predictors vary across circumstances. Specifically, we examine how factors that challenge victim credibility affect the likelihood of arrest in sexual assault cases where the victim and offender are strangers, acquaintances, and intimate partners.

Offender-victim body mass ratio and the decision to arrest in cases of intimate partner violence.

As a result of the growing trend toward criminalisation of cases of domestic violence, there has been a great increase in the number of jurisdictions in the United States that have implemented 'pro-arrest' and 'mandatory arrest' laws. One of the objectives of this legislation is to encourage arrest when there is probable cause to believe that an assault has occurred. Along with the increase in the overall rate of arrest for intimate partner violence there has been a dramatic increase in the arrest of both the parties involved in an incident. In these cases the police do not identify any one party as the primary aggressor. A number of factors may account for this. Analysing these factors can prove beneficial in guiding protocol design and the arresting officer's decision-making process. A yet untested factor that may help explain police arrest practices concerns the relative body mass between the two parties and whether the police use this factor to determine which party is the primary offender. In this study we examine the basic relationship between offender and victim body masses and arrest decisions in 950 cases from police departments in four states: Connecticut, Idaho, Virginia and Tennessee. Our analysis finds that a significant correlation exists between offenders' and victims' body masses, and the resulting arrest decisions. The cause for this relationship remains unspecified, but may involve several factors such as the ability of a larger offender to inflict trauma on a smaller victim, or simply an arresting officer's perception of offender ability to inflict trauma. The cause of this correlation may have significant implications for arrest protocols in those states currently honouring pro-arrest legislation in cases of domestic violence, and those jurisdictions considering them.

A comparison of the police response to heterosexual versus same-sex intimate partner violence.

It has been argued that the police do not respond to domestic calls involving same-sex couples in the same manner as they respond to calls involving heterosexual couples. A major problem facing researchers examining the police response to cases involving same-sex couples has been the lack of adequately sized samples. In this article, the authors utilize the 2000 National Incident Based Reporting System database, which contains 176,488 intimate partner assaults and intimidation incidents reported to 2,819 police departments in 19 states. The key issue examined is whether similar cases involving same-sex and heterosexual couples result in the same police response.

Racial disparity and the legitimacy of the criminal justice system: exploring consequences for deterrence.

Minority (over) representation in the criminal justice system remains a puzzle, both from a policy and an intervention perspective. Cross-sectional reviews of the policies and practices of the criminal justice system often find differential rates of involvement in the criminal justice system that are associated with the nature of the criminal charge/act or characteristics of the offender; however, longitudinal reviews of the race effect often show it to be confounded by procedural and extralegal variables. This review focuses on how the cumulative policies and practices of the criminal justice system contribute to churning, or the recycling of individuals through the system. In conducting our review, we describe how the same criminal justice processes and practices adversely affect select communities. The consequences of policies and procedures that contribute to churning may affect the legitimacy of the criminal justice system as a deterrent to criminal behavior. A research agenda on issues related to legitimacy of the criminal justice system aimed at a better understanding of how this affects individual and community behavior is presented.