Abstract
Research shows that people vary in their willingness to report crime to police depending on the type of crime experienced, their gender, age, and their race or ethnicity. Whether or not lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) and heterosexual people vary in their willingness to report crime to the police is not well understood in the extant literature. In this article, I examine variations in LGBTI respondents’ attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control on their intentions to report crimes to the police. Drawing on a survey of LGBTI individuals sampled from a Gay Pride community event and online LGBTI community forums ( N = 329), I use quantitative statistical methods to examine whether LGBTI people’s beliefs in police homophobia are also directly associated with the behavioral intention to report crime. Overall, the results indicate that LGBTI and heterosexual people differ significantly in their intention to report crime to the police, and that a belief in police homophobia strongly influences LGBTI people’s intention to underreport crime to the police.
Highlights
Variations in crime reporting behaviors have consistently demonstrated that people usually hold favorable views of the police and are willing to report crime to the police (Mastrofski, Parks, Reiss, & Worden, 1999), members of minority communities1 are far more reticent to report crime (Webb & Marshall, 1995)
Examination of the data indicated that LGBTI participant attitudes, subjective norms, PBCs, and beliefs in police homophobia were significantly different from those conveyed by the heterosexual community
The results indicated that under the theoretical components of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) there are differences in LGBTI and heterosexual people’s psychological mechanisms that may account for LGBTI people’s reluctance to report crime to the police
Summary
Variations in crime reporting behaviors have consistently demonstrated that people usually hold favorable views of the police and are willing to report crime to the police (Mastrofski, Parks, Reiss, & Worden, 1999), members of minority communities are far more reticent to report crime (Webb & Marshall, 1995). Members of minority groups (whose subordinate group status is defined due to external or other identifying features) differ significantly from other members of society in their willingness to interact with the police, regardless of whether the grounds for contact with police are positive or negative and or whether the outcome of police interaction may result in a constructive end to an adverse situation (see Webb & Marshall, 1995). This has been the case for members of minority groups ( identified in this way) residing in Australia (Murphy & Cherney, 2010)
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