Severity Of Crime Research Articles

A computational cognitive modeling approach to understand and design mobile crowdsourcing for campus safety reporting

The under-reporting of public safety incidents is a long-standing issue. In this paper, we propose a computational cognitive modeling approach to understand and design a mobile crowdsourcing system for improving campus safety reporting. In particular, we adopt drift-diffusion models (DDMs) from cognitive psychology to investigate the effect of various factors on users reporting tendency for public safety. Our lab experiment and online study show consistent results on how location context impacts people's reporting decisions. This finding informs the design of a novel location-based nudge mechanism, which is tested in another lab experiment with 84 participants and proved to be effective in changing users reporting decisions. Our follow-up interview study further suggests that the influence of people's mobility patterns (e.g., expected walking distance) could explain why the nudge design is effective. Our work not only informs the design of mobile crowdsourcing for public safety reporting but also demonstrates the value of applying a computational cognitive modeling approach to address HCI research questions more broadly. A computational cognitive modeling approach is used to study crowdsourcing decisions.Location context and crime severity impact people's safety reporting decisions.A novel location-based nudge mechanism is created and proved to be effective.

Bounding reasonable doubt: implications for plea bargaining

A bound for reasonable doubt is offered based on the cost of type I and type II errors. The bound increases with the punishment, hence its use as a conviction threshold may leave too many offenders of severe crimes at large. Plea bargaining addresses this limitation but introduces strategic interaction between concerned parties. Considering strategic interaction between defendants and judge/jury, it is shown that to any plea offer there corresponds a unique equilibrium. Moreover, all equilibria share the same conviction threshold, given by the reasonable doubt bound. The latter property ensures that the plea bargaining procedure is consistent with the ‘equality before the law’ principle. The former property (that to any plea offer there corresponds a unique equilibrium) bears implications for the design of plea bargain schemes.

Towards a Principled Justification for the Mixed Composition of Hybrid International Criminal Tribunals

AbstractThe justification for a majority of international judges sitting on hybrid international criminal tribunals is tremendously undertheorized. At present, policymakers must rely on base pragmatic considerations that allege that local judges are either too incapable or too corrupt. This may or may not be true. It is, however, certainly unattractive and inadequate as an argument. In this article, I sketch out a principled theoretical argument defending internationalization of hybrid tribunals. Drawing on debates in municipal jurisdictions on the principle of fair reflection, my principled justification centres on institutional and sociological legitimacy. As international crimes strike at two societies – the local and the global – hybrid tribunals should be composed of both international and local judges. In principle, the severity of international crimes dictates that international judges should predominate. However, peculiar contextual factors may suggest moderating the principle of fair reflection in appropriate circumstances.

Criminal offending and the family environment: Swedish national high-risk home-reared and adopted-away co-sibling control study.

Criminal offending is strongly transmitted across generations. To clarify the contribution of rearing environment to cross-generational transmission of crime. Using Swedish national registries, we identified 1176 full-sibling and 3085 half-sibling sets from high-risk families where at least one sibling was adopted and the other raised by the biological parents. Risk for criminal conviction was substantially lower in the full- and half-siblings who were adopted v. home-reared (hazard ratios (HR) = 0.56, 95% CI 0.50-0.64 and 0.60, 95% CI 0.56-0.65, respectively). The protective effect of adoption was significantly stronger in sibships with two v. one high-risk parent. Using matched high-risk full- and half-siblings, we found replicated evidence that (a) rearing environment has a strong impact on risk for criminal conviction, (b) high-quality rearing environments have especially strong effects in those at high familial risk for criminal offending and (c) the protective effects of adoption are stronger for more severe crimes and for repeated offending.

Punishing on a Curve

Does the punishment of one defendant change because of how she fares in comparison to the other defendants on the judge’s docket? This article demonstrates that the troubling answer is yes. Judges sentence the same case more harshly when their caseloads contain relatively milder offenses, and more leniently when their caseloads contain more serious crimes. I call this problem “punishing on a curve.”Consequently, the article shows how such relative sentencing patterns put into question the prevailing practice of establishing specialized courts or courts of limited jurisdiction. Because judges are punishing on a curve, the court’s jurisdiction systematically shapes sentencing outcomes. Courts of limited jurisdiction usually specialize in relatively less serious crimes (such as misdemeanors, drug offenses, or juvenile cases). They treat the mild offenses on their docket more harshly than generalist courts, that also see severe crimes, would have treated them. This leads to the disturbing effect of increasing punitive outcomes vis-a-vis these offenses, wholly contradictory to the missions of these courts. Such sentencing patterns undermine notions of justice and equitable treatment. They also undermine retributive principles and marginal deterrence across crimes of increasing severity.In light of the profound normative and practical implications, the article offers a remedy to standardize sentences through “statistical curving.” In addition to consulting the sentencing range recommended by the sentencing guidelines for a particular offense, a judge should see the distribution of sentences for the same offense across different courts. The article illustrates the feasibility of the proposal empirically using sentencing data from neighboring judicial districts in Pennsylvania. It also explains how this proposal fits within the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence following United States v. Booker, which rendered the sentencing guidelines advisory, and its potential advantage in improving appellate review.

Zločin genocida: međunarodno pravo i pravo Bosne i Hercegovine / Crime of Genocide - International Legislation and Legislation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Both international and national criminal legislation, considers genocide as particularly severe and socially dangerous criminal offence (crime). It is the worst form of violation of the right to life and existence of entire human groups - national, racial, religious or ethnic. This is the crime of crimes and is considered to be the most severe crime of today. In the strict sense, this is an international crime which by giving orders or taking immediate actions fully or partially destroys an entire human group. Therefore, after the World War II, on the basis of international documents adopted within the framework of the organization of UN, all modern countries included genocide in their national legislations (basic or special) as the most severe crime threatened by the most severe types and measures of sanctions. A similar situation exists in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well. However, this crime is known to numerous international documents establishing primary jurisdiction of international (permanent or temporary - ad hoc) military or civilian courts.

Non-applicability of Prescription to War Crimes during Iraq’s War against Iran

<p>International responsibility of Iraq regarding imposed war against Iran and compensating all harms has been an issue attracted public attention in Iran; in a way that sometimes it has been discussed. Nevertheless, it should not be ignored that this war happened long time ago, thus it involves the issue of Prescription or Statutory Limitations. Since the Statutory Limitation often is the main obstacle facing the culture of non-punishment, the main question is that whether Iraqi’s war crimes is supposed to prescription?</p>It should be noted that prominent values of humanity entail the condemning of severe international crimes and non-applicability of principle of prescription. Therefore, International Criminal Law through codification of regional and international documents including the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal has predicted a period of 35 years for investigation of Iraqi high-ranking officials’ crimes: Accordingly, it seems that the theory of non-applicability of prescription over Iraqi’s war crimes during war against Iran has been substantiated.

Likelihood‐Based Inference and Prediction in Spatio‐Temporal Panel Count Models for Urban Crimes

SummaryWe develop a panel count model with a latent spatio‐temporal heterogeneous state process for monthly severe crimes at the census‐tract level in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our dataset combines Uniform Crime Reporting data with socio‐economic data. The likelihood is estimated by efficient importance sampling techniques for high‐dimensional spatial models. Estimation results confirm the broken‐windows hypothesis whereby less severe crimes are leading indicators for severe crimes. In addition to ML parameter estimates, we compute several other statistics of interest for law enforcement such as spatio‐temporal elasticities of severe crimes with respect to less severe crimes, out‐of‐sample forecasts, predictive distributions and validation test statistics. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Who Owns Celebrity? – Law and the formation of Fame

Such a statement is resonant of a severe crime, but what sounds like a terrible and degrading misdeed turns out to concern the sale of pictures, taken at a celebrity wedding reception. The movie stars Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas hosted their wedding at the Plaza Hotel, New York in 2000 (see <http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=113151&page=1 - .T5b0LI5hyvk>). They granted the British magazine OK! exclusive rights to publish pictures of their marriage. However a third-party photographer managed to gain access to the premises, took pictures and sold them to the competitor magazine Hello!. After Hello! had published the pictures, Zeta-Jones and Douglas sued the magazine in order to receive compensation for their contractual partner OK!. They won the case eventually, being granted damages for breach of confidence (Douglas v Hello! Ltd. [2003] EWHC 786 at H37). Despite Michael Douglas stressing his irritation about the unlawful intrusion into the pair's privacy, the true reason for the law suit appears to be commercial. The pair had received £1,000,000 from OK! Magazine, but OK! could not make use of the monopoly to publish the couple's pictures (Douglas v Hello! Ltd. [2003] EWHC 786 at para 1). In this context Douglas's statement is an expression of the engrained perception that a celebrity has accomplished great achievements and is therefore entitled to harvest all fruits of celebrity. In times of marketing companies designing publicity strategies, the media featuring individuals in TV or press and individuals creating fan fiction as well as other user-generated content about their “stars”, this assumption seems to show only one of the manifold causes for celebrity.

Sentencing recommendations are insensitive to juvenile offender’s age and maturation

AbstractResearch on perceptions of juvenile criminals has long sought to understand what drives punishment of juvenile. While some researchers argue that age influences the punishment of juvenile offenders, others argue that more severe crimes receive harsher punishments. However, in much past research, information about the juvenile and the details surrounding the crime have been manipulated, yielding inconsistent results. In this study, we manipulated age, maturity, crime severity, and offender characteristics and measured blame, sentencing recommendations, and likelihood of a guilty verdict. We expected more severe crimes would garner harsher judgments. We also expected information about the juvenile’s reasons for acting would influence judgments. Results indicate that crime severity explained the largest amount of variance in sentencing. However, age and maturity influenced judgments about blame and guilt. This study helps clarify the effects of age and maturity on punishment-related judgments by demo...

Discriminant factors for adolescent sexual offending: On the usefulness of considering both victim age and sibling incest

Understanding the pathways and circumstances of juvenile sexual offending is of utmost importance. However, juvenile sexual offenders (JSO) represent an especially diverse group of individuals, and several categorizations have been proposed to obtain more homogeneous subgroups. Victim age-based and family relation-based categorizations are particularly promising because they seem theoretically and clinically relevant. Empirical results however are still inconsistent, and most studies have not considered these two dimensions jointly. The first goal of this study was to further examine the value of subgrouping JSO according to the age of their victim. A second goal was to determine the supplementary value, if any, of considering sibling incest. Based on a sample of 351 male JSO, it was first confirmed that sexual abuse of children was more strongly related to asociality (social skill deficits) than sexual abuse of peers, the latter being more closely associated with antisociality (general delinquency). The relevance of considering mixed-type JSO (with both child and peer victims) separately was also confirmed. More importantly, multivariate statistical analyses demonstrated that adding sibling incest to the equation was useful. JSO of intra-familial child were significantly more likely to have been victimized during their own childhood compared to JSO with extra-familial victims. Nevertheless, adolescents who had committed sibling incest obtained middle ground results on most variables (except for crime severity), suggesting that they constitute a distinct but not extreme, subgroup. This study confirmed the utility of using both the age and the family relation with the victim in characterizing juvenile sexual offending.

Statistical Modeling of Crime Severity in Sidama Zone and Its Neighbors, Ethiopia

Statistical Modeling of Crime Severity in Sidama Zone and Its Neighbors, Ethiopia

Cooperating with the State: Evidence from Survey Experiments on Policing

AbstractWe examine cooperation with the state using a series of survey experiments on policing conducted in late 2011 in Moscow, Russia, where distrust of the state is high and attempts to reform the police have been ineffective. Through various vignettes that place respondents in situations in which they are the witness or victim of a crime, we experimentally manipulate crime severity, identity of the perpetrator (whether the crime is committed by a police officer), monetary rewards, appeals to civic duty, and the opportunity cost of time spent reporting. Of these factors, crime severity and identity of the perpetrator are robustly associated with a propensity to report. Our research design and results contribute to a large literature on cooperation with the state by examining variables that may be more salient or function differently in countries with weak institutions than in developed democracies.

Angažovanje prikrivenog islednika

Basic characteristics of the organized crime and problems in preventing, detecting and proving criminal acts of organized crime and other severe crimes raises the question of adequate reaction of the state. Traditional investigation measures and methods which are used in fight against 'ordinary' criminal acts do not represent an adequate solution, and there is a need for a proactive approach, which includes the introduction and usage of special investigation measures. Faced with an overall need for the effective prosecution of organized crime, the Serbian legislature has implemented some special investigation measures, among which is the use of undercover agents. The concept of undercover agent had not existed in Serbia until the Maendments to the Criminal Procedure Law in December 2002. However, it has existed in many European and other countries which have introduced this solution in the legal procedure mainly to imrove combat against organised crime. The application of this special investigation measure carries certain problems because the undercover agent has some powers that limit human rights. Because of this problem, there are different oppinions in the legal theory about validity of this measure. However, the fact that a traditional measures do not give adequate results in combat against organized crime is a reason to reconsider the idea of engagement of the undercover agent and other special investigation measures, to precisely determine the conditions for their implementation and limit their appliance only to situations when adequate resist to the most severe forms of crime can not be achieved.

Observers’ reactions to victim impact statements

Previous research has shown that expectancy violations can have both affective and cognitive consequences. In particular, recent victimological research argues that people’s perceptions and judgments of victims are negatively influenced when their expectations of the victim’s emotional behavior are violated. That is, expectancy violation may lead to secondary victimization: victims may be judged to be less credible, suffer higher levels of victim derogation, and receive less sympathy as a result of expectancy violation. In this study, we elaborate upon these affective consequences and examine possible cognitive consequences of expectancy violation in victimological research. We found preliminary evidence for secondary victimization in both affective and cognitive domains: when evaluated by student observers, victims of ‘mildly’ severe crimes who delivered an emotional victim impact statement not only ran the risk of being evaluated as less credible than victims of more severe crimes who delivered the exact same victim impact statement, but their victim impact statement was also remembered less accurately.

Drug use, mental health and problems related to crime and violence: cross-sectional study.

Objective: to investigate the correlation between disorders related to the use of alcohol and other drugs and symptoms of mental disorders, problems related to crime and violence and to age and gender. Methods: cross-sectional descriptive study carried out with 128 users of a Psychosocial Care Center for Alcohol and other Drugs, in the city of São Paulo, interviewed by means of the instrument entitled Global Appraisal of Individual Needs - Short Screener. Univariate and multiple linear regression models were used to verify the correlation between the variables. Results: using univariate regression models, internalizing and externalizing symptoms and problems related to crime/violence proved significant and were included in the multiple model, in which only the internalizing symptoms and problems related to crime and violence remained significant. Conclusions: there is a correlation between the severity of problems related to alcohol use and severity of mental health symptoms and crime and violence in the study sample. The results emphasize the need for an interdisciplinary and intersectional character of attention to users of alcohol and other drugs, since they live in a socially vulnerable environment.

Cooperating with the State: Evidence from Survey Experiments on Policing

We examine cooperation with the state using a series of survey experiments on policing conducted in late 2011 in Moscow, Russia, where distrust of the state is high and attempts to reform the police have been ineffective. Through various vignettes that place respondents in situations in which they are the witness or victim of a crime, we experimentally manipulate crime severity, identity of the perpetrator (whether the crime is committed by a police officer), monetary rewards, appeals to civic duty, and the opportunity cost of time spent reporting. Of these factors, crime severity and identity of the perpetrator are robustly associated with a propensity to report. Our research design and results contribute to a large literature on cooperation with the state by examining variables that may be more salient or function differently in countries with weak institutions than in developed democracies.

Psychiatric disorders and violent reoffending: a national cohort study of convicted prisoners in Sweden

SummaryBackgroundReoffending and presence of psychiatric disorders are common in prisoners worldwide. However, whether psychiatric disorders are risk factors for reoffending is still unknown. We aimed to examine the association between psychiatric disorders, including substance use disorder, and violent reoffending.MethodsWe did a longitudinal cohort study of 47 326 prisoners who were imprisoned since Jan 1, 2000, and released before Dec 31, 2009, in Sweden. We obtained data for diagnosed psychiatric disorders from both inpatient and outpatient registers, and sociodemographic and criminological factors from other population-based registers. We calculated hazard ratios (HRs) for violent reoffending with Cox regression. To control for potential familial confounding, we compared sibling prisoners with and without psychiatric disorders. We calculated population attributable fraction to assess the population effect.FindingsDiagnosed psychiatric disorders were associated with an increased hazard of violent reoffending in male (adjusted HR 1·63 [95% CI 1·57–1·70]) and female (2·02 [1·54–2·63]) prisoners, and these associations were independent of measured sociodemographic and criminological factors, and, in men, remained substantial after adjustment for unmeasured familial factors (2·01 [1·66–2·43]). However, findings differed between individual diagnoses and sex. We found some evidence of stronger effects on violent reoffending of alcohol and drug use disorders and bipolar disorder than of other psychiatric disorders. Alcohol use disorder seemed to have a greater effect in women than in men (women 2·08 [1·66–2·60]; men 1·63 [1·56–1·71]). The overall effects of psychiatric disorders did not differ with severity of crime. The hazard of violent reoffending increased in a stepwise way with the number of diagnosed psychiatric disorders. Assuming causality, up to 20% (95% CI 19–22) of violent reoffending in men and 40% (27–52) in women was attributable to the diagnosed psychiatric disorders that we investigated.InterpretationCertain psychiatric disorders are associated with a substantially increased hazard of violent reoffending. Because these disorders are prevalent and mostly treatable, improvements to prison mental health services could counteract the cycle of reoffending and improve both public health and safety. National violence prevention strategies should consider the role of prison health.FundingWellcome Trust, Swedish Research Council, and Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare.

Likelihood Based Inference and Prediction in Spatio-Temporal Panel Count Models for Urban Crimes

We develop a panel data count model combined with a latent Gaussian spatio-temporal heterogenous state process to analyze monthly severe crimes at the census tract level in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our data set combines Uniform Crime Reporting data with socio-economic data from the 2000 census. The likelihood of the model is accurately estimated by adapting recently developed efficient importance sampling techniques applicable to high-dimensional spatial models with sparse precision matrices. Our estimation results confirm socio-economic explanations for crime and, foremost, the broken-windows hypothesis, whereby less severe crimes in a region is a leading indicator for severe crimes. In addition to ML parameter estimates, we compute several other statistics of interest for law enforcement such as elasticities (idiosyncratic, total, short-term as well as long-term) of severe crimes w.r.t. less severe crimes, one-month-ahead out-of-sample forecasts, predictive cumulative distribution functions and validation test statistics based on these cdf's.

Neighbourhood outreach: a novel approach to Liaison and Diversion

Aims and method: We evaluate the initial outcomes from the Cornwall Criminal Justice Liaison and Diversion Service (CJLDS) which includes a pilot Neighbourhood Outreach scheme to support police with vulnerable individuals with suspected mental illness but not necessarily criminal involvement. Results: We review the first nine months’ operational data, including a six month follow-up of the initial three months’ to assess the impact of intervention. The service identified a large proportion of new cases of mental illness at an earlier stage. Intervention significantly reduced the number of contacts with police and may suggest a reduction in the severity of crime. Clinical implications: The Cornwall CJLDS with its pilot Neighbourhood Outreach has had a significant impact on both health and on crime, with additional cost savings. The degree to which this is replicable is discussed. Declaration of interest: None