Police Responses to Violent Crime

Abstract

This work advances the relatively limited literature pertaining to police clearances of serious violent crimes by comparing and contrasting the correlates of homicide clearance with clearance of nonlethal violent crimes. Using 5 years of National Incident-Based Reporting System data from 2008 to 2012 and survival models, we analyze the impact of various victim and incident characteristics on time to clearance outcomes for four offense types: homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and sexual assault. Examining longitudinal trends of clearance rates reveals important differences across violent crime types. Results of survival models also reveal substantial variation in the effects of victim and incident characteristics on time to clearance across types of violent crime. These findings indicate that results from previous studies on homicide case outcomes are not applicable to other types of violent crimes, and police efforts to solve violent crimes differ markedly. As such, the theoretical frameworks of mobilization of law and bounded rationality explanations for variation in police responses to violent crime may be more viable than found in previous studies. However, future research will need to consider these nuances to confirm if such dynamics extend to other forms of criminal behavior.