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Arrests as Communication to Criminals: A User's Guide to the Machine-Readable Files and Documentation and Codebook

NCJ Number
146229
Author(s)
C W Kohfeld; J Sprague
Date Published
1992
Length
23 pages
Annotation
These two volumes present background and coding information for a data set collected for a study that assessed the deterrent effects, over time, of arrests. Data set archived by the NIJ Data Resources Program at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, located at URL http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/nacjd.
Abstract
The study was prompted by recognition of the difficulty of using many data bases to assess a specific hypothesis, which asserts that within defined spatial areas the police response to criminal behavior occurs in a very short time frame, while the criminal response to police behavior is spread out or diffused in time. Technical problems of simultaneity prevent the use of many data bases to assess this hypothesis. In this study, the data were obtained from the Planning Department of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, which supplied all crime reports received by the police and all arrests for the years 1970-82, except for 1971. The data are contained in two files. The first contains information on all 802,061 felony crimes reported to the St. Louis City Metropolitan Police Department from 1970 to 1982. The file is divided by year into 12 years. The second file contains information on all 154,710 felony arrests in St. Louis from 1970 to 1982. Tables and coding information