Citation

Cureton SR. J. Crim. Justice 2001; 29(2): 157-166.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2001, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S0047-2352(00)00091-X

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Attempts to understand the impact of criminal conduct and group characteristics on arrest rates have been plagued by inappropriate measures of race specific criminal conduct because previous researchers have been inferring race specific crime participation from arrest rates or victimization. The problem is arrest rates do not reflect all crimes or even all crimes known to the police and victimization data has critical shortcoming. Therefore, a more accurate measure of Black and White actual criminal behavior was constructed to test the conflict related social threat phenomenon. The evidence indicates that there is a significant relationship between proportion Black and arrest differentials and that this relationship may be a reflection of Whites' perceptions of threat relative to the proportion of Blacks in a city's population more so than their criminal conduct.