Neighborhood Disadvantage and Reliance on the Police
Neighborhood Disadvantage and Reliance on the Police
Article Type: Policing on the web From: Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Volume 35, Issue 3.
Lonnie M. Schaible and Lorine A. HughesCrime & DelinquencyVol. 58pp. 245-274
Some research suggests that within economically disadvantaged neighborhoods,residents are more reticent to summon the police for help due to strained relations between community members and the police. However, other research suggests that members of disadvantaged communities might lack other sources of social control to respond to crime problems and are forced to rely on the police more than members of more economically well-off neighborhoods. The authors test these competing explanations using calls for service data from a police department in a mid-seize metropolitan city in the Pacific Northwest region of the USA with block groups serving as the proxy for neighborhoods. Additionally,the authors use a spatial lag model to control for the spatial auto-correlation of values on the dependent and independent variables.
The authors were interested in examining the potential variation in willingness to call the police for a number of reasons and included calls for service measures for disorder; threats and harassment; property crimes; violent crimes; and total calls for service. The authors created a measure of neighborhood disadvantage by combining census measures frequently associated with social disorganization research (e.g. median income, poverty, etc.). In order to account for differences in neighborhood population size, the authors included the log of the population. The results from the analyses indicate that disadvantage was positively associated with calls for police service, and the strength of the relationship varied by call type. The relationship was strongest for calls reporting threats and harassment or other acts of physical violence. Interestingly, despite having a significant value on the indicator of spatial association, the spatial lag variables were not significant in any of the models. The authors suggest this may well be the result of accounting for other variables in the model.
Additionally, the authors were able to test whether this relationship would hold after the police department modified the system citizens could use to report calls for service. Due to budgetary constraints, the police department eliminated a 24-hour phone line where reports could be filed without dispatching an officer, and replaced it with an internet-based system that would allow for citizens to create their own police reports that would then be reviewed by someone else. The results suggest that this change reduced the number of calls in the most advantaged neighborhoods, while doing little to change the number of calls for police service in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The authors speculate the change in reporting behavior in advantaged neighborhoods is a by-product of having other means of exercising social control. When citizens of these advantaged neighborhoods are unable to summon the police at will, because of the removal of the telephone system, they implement other means of social control. However, citizens in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods have no option other than the police to serve as agents of social control. The authors conclude by stating that future research should continue to examine the contextual effects associated with summoning the police; and the potential response bias associated with certain segments of the population being unable to summon the police.
