IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlawec/doi10.1086-719847.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Inequality in the Provision of Police Services: Evidence from Residential Burglary Investigations

Author

Listed:
  • Rebecca Goldstein

Abstract

When crime victims call the police for help, what type of response do they receive? While scholars have extensively documented racial inequalities in the police’s punitive functions, this paper considers the police as service providers. It leverages uniquely granular data on over 2,500 residential burglary investigations in Tucson, Arizona, to consider the predictors of investigative thoroughness. Contrary to conventional wisdom about police behavior, the demographics of victims or officers do not consistently predict investigative thoroughness. Instead, the most important predictor of investigative thoroughness is whether the burglary involved a forced entry into the residence, since forced-entry cases feature more evidence and thus provide greater likelihood of case clearance. However, the probability of forced entry differs significantly by neighborhood, which means that the seemingly neutral decision to maximize clearance rates has unequal consequences.

Suggested Citation

  • Rebecca Goldstein, 2022. "Inequality in the Provision of Police Services: Evidence from Residential Burglary Investigations," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65(3), pages 487-513.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/719847
    DOI: 10.1086/719847
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/719847
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/719847
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/719847?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/719847. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLE .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.