Thomas Lind Scott

According to national data, law enforcement solved fewer than half of all violent crimes that came to their attention in 2023. Although there are no national data on court outcomes in violent crime cases, these statistics would likely equally demonstrate the criminal legal system’s (CLS) limited ability to address violent crime. One known barrier to successful CLS outcomes in violent crime cases is a lack of participation in the CLS by victims and witnesses (V/Ws) of these crimes. This is especially true in crimes of severe community violence, which is the focus of this study. By speaking with recent V/Ws of severe community violence and CLS actors and community service provider professionals who work with V/Ws of severe community violence in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina, we seek to understand the lack of V/W participation and to inform solutions for increasing and improving V/W CLS participation in the region. We identified several barriers and needs that can be addressed to promote CLS participation, including better resourcing CLS agencies to support and protect V/Ws by employing victim advocates, increasing safety protections, and by improving trust between residents and the CLS. In addition to increasing CLS participation by V/Ws of these crimes, these measures are likely to address the extensive amount of unresolved trauma we identified that has been caused by V/Ws experiencing these crimes without adequate services and support.

When the Arlington, Texas, Police Department (APD) began using the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), its understanding of local crime trends and the factors driving them was transformed. NIBRS has allowed APD to better identify the precise offences driving changes in more aggregated offence categories and to respond to crime more effectively. With larceny-theft as an example, we describe APD’s NIBRS transition, how it altered crime control strategy , and how it impacted APD’s responses to crime. This description serves as an example to the field of the value of NIBRS for developing effective crime prevention strategies and tactics. We also analyse APD’s NIBRS data for the years 2017 and 2018 to demonstrate other possible uses of these data that would allow law enforcement agencies to better understand the factors driving crime in their jurisdiction. We explain how this understanding can lead to more targeted and effective policing strategies and tactics.

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) disaggregates crime clearances into crimes cleared by arrest and crimes cleared by exceptional means. This feature is an improvement to the Summary Reporting System and allows law enforcement agencies to perform cross-jurisdiction comparisons of their clearance practices and investigative performances. This study uses sexual assault clearance rates to demonstrate a method of cross-jurisdiction comparison, which can be used to improve agency practices. Findings show much variability in sexual assault clearance rates across agencies, but most of this variation is explained by agency use of clearance by exceptional means. Further, no single agency characteristic examined here explained variability in exceptional clearance rates. Finally, there was additional agency variation in the offense type used to clear a sexual assault by arrest. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of NIBRS for advancing law enforcement research and practice and the need for greater attention to data quality in NIBRS.

Purpose: Sexual assault investigations present uniquely challenging circumstances to detectives, and a small proportion result in arrest. Improving sexual assault investigations requires expanding the evidence base to improve our understanding of how these investigations unfold and the factors associated with positive case outcomes, including the likelihood that an offender is arrested.Design/methodology/approach: The authors abstracted data on 491 adult sexual assaults investigated by five large and midsized law enforcement agencies to describe the characteristics of sexual assault investigations and to explain the relationships between these characteristics and the likelihood that a suspect is arrested.Findings: Overall, detectives move swiftly to investigate sexual assaults but tend to miss investigative opportunities that increase the likelihood of an arrest, like locating and processing the crime scene or pursuing interviews with key witnesses and leads. Sexual assaults typically lack physical evidence that can be used to identify and lead to an arrest of a suspected offender; when this evidence is present, the case is more likely to result in an arrest. Delayed reporting of the crime to law enforcement decreases the likelihood of a suspect being arrested, but the mechanisms are unclear.Originality/value: Few studies have used a detailed data abstraction process for a large sample of cases from multiple law enforcement agencies to understand sexual assault investigations and their case outcomes. The results can improve practitioners' and researchers' understanding of sexual assault investigations, including those factors that increase the likelihood of a suspect's arrest.

Purpose: This paper addresses the clearance of aggravated assaults (AAs). Specifically, the authors consider variations in these clearances over time for large agencies and test which crime, investigation and agency factors are associated with the likelihood of clearance by arrest or exceptional means. In doing this work, they seek to extend the understanding of how police can improve their investigations and ability to solve serious offenses.Design/methodology/approach: Using case, investigative and organizational data collected from seven large police departments selected on the basis of their trajectory of index crime clearances, and measures of case characteristics, investigative effort and organizational best practices, this paper uses descriptive and inferential statistics to analyze AA investigations and case clearance.Findings: Key findings include the following: trajectories of AA clearance vary across large agencies and covary with a measure of organizational best practices, and the relationship between investigative effort and case clearance can depend on organizational practices. The authors find that measures of investigative effort are either not related to case clearance or there is a negative association.Research limitations/implications: Now that police researchers have a better understanding of AAs and their investigations, they need to test how this knowledge can be used to improve the quality of police investigations. Tests, preferably multi-agency randomized control trials, of new investigative strategies and organizational practices are needed.Originality/value: This research is original in that it uses a multi-agency sample and crime, investigation and organizational measures to understand AA clearance.

One of the defining features of U.S. correctional facilities is their physical security. The perimeter fences, high walls, and locked doors meant to both protect society from convicted offenders and keep those inside the facility safe. Although some research suggests physical security features are salient correlates of correctional order, there is little empirical evidence to support this claim. This knowledge gap is problematic, because disorder in correctional facilities is both frequent and costly. To estimate the effect of physical security features on two measures of facility disorder – interpersonal violence and absconding – this study utilized six waves of data from the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census and multivariate logistic regression. The mixed findings are discussed along with directions for future research.

Average crime clearance rates have remained remarkably stable in the United States since the 1980s, despite many advances in investigative technologies or fluctuations in crime. Taking these average trends at face value, some have suggested that this stability indicates that police departments can do little to alter their clearance rates. However, in this study, we find that the average trends mask substantial long-term variation in crime clearance among police agencies. Using group-based trajectory modeling, we test whether large U.S. police departments have reported uniquely different long-term clearance rate trends from 1981 to 2013 and what organizational factors might contribute to different trends. As we discuss, this method has attractive qualities that provide for a more rigorous analysis compared with past comparative work. Our results show diverse levels and patterns of clearance both within individual crime types and across multiple crime types that appear to covary with organizational factors. We explain how finite mixture modeling can advance both quantitative and qualitative research by identifying departmental differences in performance for further study.