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This paper aims to examine factors that influence the decision to report by victims of identity theft victimization. The study of victim decision-making is not new within the field of criminology; however, a majority of the research has focused on decision-making surrounding victims of intimate partner violence and other violent offenses. With the increase of identity theft, knowledge on how a growth in such a crime influences victims is of great concern.

Guided by Donald Black’s theory of the behavior of law, this study will use the 2012 Identity Theft Supplement of the National Crime Victimization Survey to identify factors that influence whether victims of identity theft report the crime to credit agencies and/or authorities.

This study finds that measures that influence reporting behaviors differ based on the method of reporting (i.e. reporting to a credit card company, law enforcement or a credit bureau). These findings provide little support for Black’s theory of law, but have several theoretical and policy implications.

This study provides a partial test of Black’s theory of law, as it applies to identity theft victims. While providing little support for the theory, the findings identify many areas that agencies and researchers can use to help further inform their studies and practices.

Familiar identity theft, which occurs when an individual known to a victim steals his/her identity, is a common problem in the USA. The purpose of this study was to understand familiar identity theft victims’ reporting behaviors using Black's (1976) theory of law as a conceptual framework.

Data were obtained from the 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 administrations of the National Crime Victimization Survey – Identity Theft Supplement. A series of cross-tabulations were conducted to examine the relationship between reporting behaviors and age, minority, gender, income, marital status and education. Fisher’s exact test was used to interpret the findings.

Key findings include older familiar identity theft victims who personally lost greater sums of money because of identity theft victimization were more likely to report to law enforcement than younger familiar identity theft victims who personally lost less money. Married familiar identity theft victims were less likely to report to law enforcement than those who were not married.

This study extends the work of Golladay (2017) to explore the reporting behaviors of a population of identity theft victims that have been largely overlooked in empirical literature.

The present study assesses the contextual racial effects on police decisions to arrest in traffic stops.

A hierarchical logistic regression model is conducted using data collected from the Houston Police Department and US census.

The authors’ multilevel analysis indicates that the racial effect on police decision to arrest is more likely to be contextual than individual. Black and Hispanic drivers have no significant difference from White drivers in police decisions to arrest when area variations are controlled. In contrast, the concentrations of Blacks and other racial minorities in areas are significantly associated with the chance of being arrested by police in traffic stops. However, as the level of racial diversity increases in an area, the chance of being arrested is likely to decrease.

This study demonstrates the importance of racial characteristics of areas in the study of racial profiling and related police practice.

Terrorism has much in common with genocide and sometimes may even be a form of genocide. In this chapter I systematically compare these two phenomena.

Drawing mainly from Donald Black’s work on terrorism and my own work on genocide, I examine the conceptual and theoretical overlap between terrorism and genocide.

Terrorism and genocide are similar and sometimes overlapping, and they occur under similar social conditions – in response to conflicts between socially distant and unequal groups. Conceptually they differ mainly in that terrorism is covert and carried out by civilians, and genocide may not be. The main theoretical difference is that terrorism tends to be upward – against more powerful targets – while genocide tends to be downward – against less powerful targets. Terrorism tends to be less effective than extreme genocide, then, and the most extreme cases have death tolls much lower than the most extreme cases of genocide.

This analysis draws from previous theories of terrorism, genocide, and social control to better place terrorism in a broader sociological context. In doing so it highlights and explains key features of terrorism, and it even helps us to speculate about the future of terrorism. That is, technological advances might in the long run destroy the social conditions conducive to terrorism, thus leading to terrorism’s ultimate demise, but in the short run they might allow terrorists to more effectively kill, leading terrorism to resemble extreme genocide in its deadliness.

Although many studies have examined the correlates of homicide clearance rates, few analyses have examined the factors related to the clearance of burglary offenses. The purpose of this paper is to address several gaps in the literature to determine if burglary clearance rates are due to discretionary, non-discretionary, and/or neighborhood contextual factors.

Data are analyzed from more than 10,000 burglary incidents in Philadelphia from 2010 using multilevel models to simultaneously test for the influence of multiple perspectives of the factors of crime clearance.

The results indicate that variables representing broken windows enforcement, discretionary factors, and non-discretionary factors are related to the increased likelihood that burglaries are cleared, but processes associated with social disorganization within communities is not.

The findings contribute to the literature by showing that future examinations of the factors of burglary clearance should consider community contextual factors, and specifically, that broken windows police enforcement appears to be a more important predictor of burglary clearance than do factors related to social disorganization theory. As a result, it is suggested that law enforcement also consider their tactics regarding low-level offenses if they wish to address the clearance rate of burglaries.

This analysis is among the first to examine multiple perspectives of the factors of crime clearance on burglary incidents.

Drawing on the theoretical system known as pure sociology, this chapter presents a theory of the transition from ordinary citizen to dedicated terrorist.

We support our argument with data drawn from the diverse literature on terrorist affiliation, with particular emphasis on qualitative investigations into the background of individual terrorists.

The transition from citizen to terrorist represents a dramatic increase in commitment to a moral cause, or partisanship. Such commitment is a product of a specific social geometry: social closeness to a powerful organization and social distance from the enemy. That geometry is triggered by a movement of social time entailing loss and proceeds via gravitational attraction. If uninterrupted, the process reverses social time, resulting in a highly partisan geometry that calls forth risky sacrifice for the cause and severe violence toward enemy civilians.

Our theory builds upon network explanations of the transition to terrorism but goes beyond them in three ways: (1) it provides an explanation of the initial drift into terrorist networks; (2) it does not invoke psychology, purposes or other subjective mental states of the actors; and (3) it situates the transition to terrorism within a general theory of conflict.

Police factor in extra‐legal as well as legal context in their decision to arrest a suspect. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of extra‐legal factors at both situational and neighborhood levels.

Using hierarchical generalized linear modeling, over 9,000 domestic violence cases across 421 census tracts in Houston, Texas were examined. Situational information was derived from police reports, and neighborhood factors were measured by population characteristics drawn from the US Census Bureau. The model also controls for spatial autocorrelation of arrest rates between census tracts in the estimation of officer's arrest decision.

At the neighborhood level, concentrated disadvantage and immigration concentration had positive effect on the odds of arrest. At the situational level, the time of day, day of the week, premise type, and gender and racial relations between suspect and complainant, along with offense type and weapons use, had significant impact.

The scant literature has not yet provided an affirmative set of extra‐legal factors affecting police arrest decision. The paper's findings may contribute to the literature and suggest the need for guidelines concerning officer discretion exercised in the line of duty.