Abstract
The capacity of police departments to solve crimes and apprehend offenders is low for many types of crime, particularly crimes of profit. This article reviews a variety of studies of police apprehension and hypothesizes that an important determinant of the ability of the police to apprehend criminals is information. The complete absence of information for many types of crime places fairly clear upper bounds on the ability of the police to effect solutions. To discover whether these boundaries are high or low we analyzed data from the 1973 National Crime Panel about the types and amount of information potentially available to police through victim reports and patrol activities. The evidence suggests that if the police rely on information made readily available to them, they will never do much better than they are doing now. On the other hand, there appears to be more information available to bystanders and passing patrols than currently is being used, which suggests that surveillance strategies and improved police methods for eliciting, recording, and analyzing information supplied by victims and witnesses might increase the probability of solving crimes and making arrests. In light of this we review a few possibly helpful innovations suggested in the literature on police productivity and procedure.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 217-241 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Journal of Criminal Justice |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1979 |
Funding
Wesley G. Skogan was supported in part during the development of this paper by a Visiting Fellowship grant (76NI-994032)f rom the National institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and by the Center for Urban Affairs at Northwestern University’s Research Agreement Program grant (77Nl-994018)f rom the same source. George E. Antunes was partially supportedb y a grant (5T32-MH-15222-02fr)o m the National Institute of Mental Health to the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Points of view or opinions statedh ere are those of the authorsa nd do not representt he official position of the United States Departmento f Justice or the National Institute of Mental Health. An earlier version of this paper was presenteda t the 1978m eetingo f the Midwest Political Science Association.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Applied Psychology
- Sociology and Political Science
- Law
