CRIME, REPORTING, AND INVESTIGATION: DISENTANGLING THE EQUILIBRIA

W. David Allen

Abstract

    Recent economic research on decisions made by victims of crime has begun to shed light on what influences crime victims’ decision to report their victimizations to police as well as specific reasons for not reporting. To date, however, we have seen little systematic examination of what happens in the immediate aftermath of reporting: the extent to which police actually investigate the crimes that victims report. This paper studies the formation and determinants of five possible equilibrium outcomes relating to reporting and investigation. If a victim reports the crime, investigative pursuit may or may not happen. If a victim does not report the crime, someone else (a witness) may report, followed by investigative pursuit or non-pursuit. Otherwise, neither reporting (by anyone) nor investigative pursuit occurs, empirically the most common outcome. A simple conceptual model illustrates the generalized factors that affect the reporting decision itself and that might make any of these four outcomes prevail. Dichotomous and multinomial logit analysis undertaken using data from the 2004 National Crime Victimization Survey reveals a profile of incident characteristics, offender characteristics, and victim characteristics uniquely associated with the four most interesting outcomes and shared amongst the outcomes. The first wave of empirical results reveals systematic differences in the extent of follow-up investigative pursuit along demographic lines—patterns that suggest differences in the immediate returns to reporting across certain socioeconomic characteristics of crime victims. But additional statistical probing shows that much of this variation reflects systematic demographic differences in the victimization experience itself.

This abstract was last updated on 27 October, 2008.