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.

Defying negative expectations: dimensions of fair and respectful treatment by police officers as perceived by people with mental illness.

Programs to improve police interactions with persons with mental illness are being initiated across the country. In order to assess the impact of such interventions with this population, we must first understand the dimensions of how police encounters are experienced by consumers themselves. Using procedural justice theory as a sensitizing framework, we used in-depth semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of twenty persons with mental illness in 67 encounters with police. While participants came into contact with police in a variety of ways, two main themes emerged. First, they feel vulnerable and fearful of police, and second, the way police treated them mattered. Findings elaborate on dimensions of procedural justice theory and are informative for police practice and mental health services.

Improving police response to persons with mental illness: a multi-level conceptualization of CIT.

The large numbers of people with mental illness in jails and prisons has fueled policy concern in all domains of the justice system. This includes police practice, where initial decisions to involve persons in the justice system or divert them to mental health services are made. One approach to focus police response in these situations is the implementation of Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT). The CIT model is being implemented widely, with over 400 programs currently operating. While the limited evidence on CIT effectiveness is promising, research on CIT is limited in scope and conceptualization-much of it focusing on officer characteristics and training. In this paper we review the literature on CIT and present a conceptual model of police response to persons with mental illness that accounts for officer, organizational, mental health system and community level factors likely to influence implementation and effectiveness of CIT and other approaches. By moving our conceptualizations and research in this area to new levels of specificity, we may contribute more to effectiveness research on these interventions.

Horizons of context: understanding the police decision to arrest people with mental illness.

The criminalization hypothesis assumes that deinstitutionalization coupled with inadequate police training has led to the increased arrest of people with mental illness. Arrest is viewed as a means to manage the troublesome behavior that often results from mental illness. Supporting research has emphasized the contributing role that illness plays in the arrest decision. This assumption largely ignores an extant criminal justice literature on the factors that influence arrest. On the basis of a review of this criminal justice literature, beginning with Bittner's 1967 seminal work, a framework is proposed that incorporates three contexts -- manipulative, temporal, and scenic -- surrounding the police encounter and the relationship of these contexts to mental illness. These three "horizons" incorporate the characteristics of the community, the offender, and the incident, all of which are recognized as influential in shaping police discretion. The scenic horizon is indicative of the features of the community. The temporal horizon includes police knowledge that stretches beyond the specific incident and officer characteristics. The manipulative horizon involves the current incident from the standpoint of the officer and includes considerations of safety for the community as well as the immediate concerns of the officer. Implications of this framework are then explored with respect to both police and mental health service mandates.