Robbery Offences Research Articles

Charge reduction: An analysis of prosecutorial discretion in burglary and robbery cases

Although a substantial number of researchers have studied charge reductions taking place within the context of guilty plea negotiations, few have focused on estimating the determinants of charge reductions taking place at the initial screening decision. The prosecutor's decision to reduce original felony charges to a misdemeanor has serious social, legal, and economic consequences for the suspect. This paper presents a model of the variables affecting the likelihood of such a reduction in burglary and robbery offenses. Drawing from Littrell's “principled charging” perspective and earlier research on labeling, the analysis involves estimating logistic regression equations specifying both main and interaction effects of the suspect's gender and race and variables related to suspect character, case seriousness, and legal seriousness. Partial support is found for Littrell's perspective.

Social indicators and crime rate forecasting

This paper presents an attempt to use macrodynamic social indicators in a time series analysis of three crime categories-homicide; property and; robbery offenses in Israel. Earlier findings such as the relationship between homicide and unemployment, and density of population and property offenses are confirmed by the analysis. The models that are constructed are used later for forecasting and yield a satisfactory performance of at least two of the crime models.