Detectives’ Descriptions of Their Responses to Sexual Assault Cases and Victims: Assessing the Overlap Between Rape Myths and Focal Concerns

Increasing just responses to sexual assault requires understanding how police perceive sexual assault cases and victims, and which legal (e.g., evidence), extralegal (e.g., suspect characteristics), and practical (e.g., convictability) concerns influence their responses in these cases. Using interview data collected in the Los Angeles Sexual Assault Study, we qualitatively analyzed 611 comments made by 52 detectives in response to questions about case processing decisions (e.g., what it takes to arrest) to examine the factors detectives described as relevant to their assessments of allegations as legitimate, victims as credible, and cases as chargeable. Results revealed overlap between rape myths and legal, extralegal, and practical concerns. Specifically, comments referenced rape myths in relation to suspect blameworthiness and dangerousness, evidence, victim cooperation, and prosecutors’ decisions. Comments also revealed some detectives lacked knowledge of relevant legal statutes and case processing guidelines (e.g., unfound criteria). These results suggest that sexual assault case attrition stems from an orientation to prosecutors’ charging criteria rather than probable cause, and organizational factors, such as deprioritization of sex crimes investigations. We recommend that departments adequately staff and equip sex crimes units with investigatory resources and prioritize sex crimes investigations over non-violent crimes. Departments should incentivize sex crimes assignments and screen applicants for quality, experience, and bias. Detectives in these units should undergo regular trainings on unfounding and probable cause criteria and should be required to make arrests when they have probable cause to do so.

To Report or Not to Report? A Focal Concerns Analysis of Victim Reporting Decisions Following Victimization

Sexual assault (SA) decision-making literature primarily focuses on criminal-legal actors and often overlooks victim decision making. This relative dearth in research is problematic, as victims are principal gatekeepers of the criminal-legal process who influence whether perpetrators are arrested and prosecuted. Subsequent victim support is also contingent on the reporting decision. Overall, this body of research would benefit from a better understanding of how victims activate and participate with the criminal-legal system and the potential impact of these decisions on criminal-legal processes. Moreover, victim decision making is often situated in a theoretical analyses. Victim decision making is complex and should be studied within a criminological decision-making framework. Therefore, the current study relies on National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data and applies a focal concerns perspective (FCP), informed by rape culture concepts, to examine why victims of sexual violence may or may not choose to report to legal authorities. The current study offers initial support for the application of FCP to victim reporting decisions. We found that victims consider each of the focal concerns (FC). Victims were more likely to report when offenders threatened them with harm (i.e., suspect blameworthiness), when the offense occurred in a private location (i.e., protection of the community), and when they sought help from victim support agencies or medical treatment (i.e., practical considerations). Additionally, we found that Black victims were more likely to report than other racial-ethnic groups (i.e., perceptual shorthand). These findings highlight a nexus between reporting to police and help-seeking via support agencies. Importantly, the results emphasize the importance for police to implement cultural competence and antiracist training to better support Black victims.

The Most Discriminatory Federal Judges Give Black and Hispanic Defendants At Least Double the Sentences of White Defendants

In the aggregate, racial inequality in criminal sentencing is an empirically well- established social problem. Yet, data limitations have made it impossible for researchers to systematically determine and name the most racially discriminatory federal judges. The authors use a new, large-scale database to determine and name the observed federal judges who impose the harshest sentence length penalties on Black and Hispanic defendants. Following the focal concerns framework, the authors (1) replicate previous findings that conditional racial disparities in sentence lengths are large in the aggregate, (2) show that judges vary considerably in their estimated degrees of racial discrimination, and (3) list the federal judges who exhibit the clearest evidence of racial discrimination. This list shows that several judges give Black and Hispanic defendants double the sentences they give observationally equivalent white defendants. Accordingly, the results suggest that holding the very most discriminatory judges accountable would yield meaningful improvements in racial equality.

How public reaction to disease information across scales and the impacts of vector control methods influence disease prevalence and control efficacy

With the development of social media, the information about vector-borne disease incidence over broad spatial scales can cause demand for local vector control before local risk exists. Anticipatory intervention may still benefit local disease control efforts; however, infection risks are not the only focal concerns governing public demand for vector control. Concern for environmental contamination from pesticides and economic limitations on the frequency and magnitude of control measures also play key roles. Further, public concern may be focused more on ecological factors (i.e., controlling mosquito populations) or on epidemiological factors (i.e., controlling infection-carrying mosquitoes), which may lead to very different control outcomes. Here we introduced a generic Ross-MacDonald model, incorporating these factors under three spatial scales of disease information: local, regional, and global. We tailored and parameterized the model for Zika virus transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquito. We found that sensitive reactivity caused by larger-scale incidence information could decrease average human infections per patch breeding capacity, however, the associated increase in total control effort plays a larger role, which leads to an overall decrease in control efficacy. The shift of focal concerns from epidemiological to ecological risk could relax the negative effect of the sensitive reactivity on control efficacy when mosquito breeding capacity populations are expected to be large. This work demonstrates that, depending on expected total mosquito breeding capacity population size, and weights of different focal concerns, large-scale disease information can reduce disease infections without lowering control efficacy. Our findings provide guidance for vector-control strategies by considering public reaction through social media.

Police Stop and Frisk and the Impact of Race: A Focal Concerns Theory Approach

The findings of this study outline the racial differences in stop and frisk decisions by Illinois officers in consent searches and those based upon reasonable suspicion within the context of the elements of focal concerns theory. The analysis for this study was performed using propensity score matching (PSM) and allowed the researchers to create a quasi-experimental design to examine the race of the citizen and police decision making. According to our analysis of official Illinois law enforcement data, Black citizens, particularly males, were less likely to give their consent to a stop and frisk search. Black male citizens were also more likely to be stopped and searched due to an assessment of reasonable suspicion by the officer. Elements of focal concerns theory were also factors in pedestrian stops under conditions of consent and reasonable suspicion. Citizens judged as blameworthy were more likely to be stopped and frisked under conditions of consent and reasonable suspicion. The effect of a verbal threat and the officer’s prior knowledge about the citizen had even more significant impacts.

County-Level Context and Sentence Lengths for Black, Latinx, and White Individuals Sentenced to Prison: A Multi-Level Assessment

This article examines the relationship between race, ethnicity, county-level contextual variables, and sentence lengths for Black, Latinx, and White individuals sentenced to prison. Hierarchical linear modeling is used to examine the focal concerns perspective, the racial/ethnic threat thesis, socioeconomic inequality across racial/ethnic groups, political climate, and individual-level factors and sentence lengths. Data come from the National Corrections Reporting Program and other sources to examine sentences for over 500,000 individuals admitted to U.S. prisons between 2015 and 2017, from 751 counties. Results indicate that Black and Latinx individuals receive longer sentences than their White counterparts, even after controlling for relevant variables. The racial/ethnic threat thesis is not supported. Black individuals are sentenced longer than their White counterparts in counties with larger shares of Republican voters. Findings indicate that race and ethnicity continue to be salient predictors of punishment, with Black and Latinx individuals facing harsher outcomes than their White counterparts.

Focal Concerns and Intimate Partner Violence Case Processing: Predicting Arrest Using a Stratified Random Sample of Police Case File Data

Focal concerns has utility for explaining criminal justice decisions, including among police. At present, there is no research that has examined focal concerns and arrest decisions in non-sexual, intimate partner violence (IPV) cases. This study used a stratified random sample of 776 IPV incidents from an urban police department in one of the five largest and most diverse US cities to assess the effect of focal concerns on arrest. A multivariate binary logistic regression model demonstrated victim injury, suspect IPV and general criminal history, evidence, witnesses, victim preference for formal intervention, women victims, and intoxicated suspects predicted arrest. When the suspect was on scene, this was the strongest predictor of arrest. Implications and future research are discussed.

So Manga Pananaroon Sa Ranaw: Reflections of Meranaw Culture and Worldview

This study was undertaken to analyze the Meranaw pananaroon and discover, through the signs incorporated in them, what they express and reveal of the Meranaw people’s worldview, culture, and character. Sample pananaroons were classified and described according to context in the culture, that is, situations for which they are designed or meant to be used, based on appropriateness or fittingness and relevance. They were next subjected to semiotic and intertextual analysis, with cultural semiotics as the approach, focusing on how the signs are utilized for meaning-making, and what these reveal of the Meranaws as individuals and as a socio-cultural group. Focal concerns in the study were the Meranaw worldview, culture, and character. The study established that the pananaroon, the Meranaw word for the English proverb, adage, aphorism, and other gnomic sayings or utterances and homespun generalizations about life, are employed not only for rhetoric but purposes such as emphasis on a central message, conveyance of indirection and subtlety to avoid offense, allusion, self-deprecation or show of humility/self-effacement, irony, scorn (kapangilat), overstatement (hyperbole) and understatement. From the analyses of select pananaroon, through the lenses of the natural and cultural signs that conveyed them, the foundational ideals and overarching worldview that Meranaws value regardless of context and situation were also drawn: patience and prudence, avoidance of acting or deciding on impulse; belief in calculated boldness and arduous journeys; finding procrastination or vacillation as a fault; allowance and forgiveness for falling short of one’s expectations; humility; awareness of one’s station, revealing an ingrained and internalized class system; sensitivity, and; an overarching wish for clearness, harmony, order and peace (rinaw) in all things. The depths that the results this study reached not only strengthens semiotic analysis as a viable approach to proverb and linguistic/folklore studies, but also opens up new avenues or paths for fresh inquiry on Meranaw pananaroon, oral tradition, and folklore, and culture in general.