Property crime victims' decision to notify the police: social, cognitive, and affective determinants

Crime Reporting and Institutional Reputation of the Police in Mexico

Understanding the determinants of crime reporting is fundamental to developing responsive judicial services that seek to pursue justice while fostering good relations with citizens. Building on Carpenter’s (Carpenter, D. (2014). Reputation and power: Organizational image and pharmaceutical regulation at the FDA. Princeton University Press.) dimensions of reputation and the principles of procedural justice, this article aims to explore the influence of institutional reputation on crime reporting decisions for the Mexican case. To test three hypotheses at an individual level, nested logit models were estimated with information from a victimization survey in Mexico over a 9-year period. Findings suggest that time spent in prosecutors’ offices and the perception of untrustworthiness, related to two of the reputation dimensions described in this study’s framework, are negatively associated to the probability of reporting a crime. Our results have implications for public policy regarding the treatment by the police of the population reporting a crime. This is particularly relevant in regions such as Latin America, characterized by high victimization and the lack of adequate procedural justice in situations of contact between the public and police authorities.

Law and emotion: a proposed taxonomy of an emerging field

Scholars from diverse fields have begun to study the intersection of emotion and law. The notion that reason and emotion are cleanly separable--and that law rightly privileges and admits only of the former--is deeply engrained. Law and emotion scholarship proceeds instead from the belief that the legal relevance of emotion is both significant and deserving of (and amenable to) close scrutiny. It is organized around six approaches, each of which is defined and discussed: emotion-centered, emotional phenomenon, emotion theory, legal doctrine, theory of law; and legal actor. Drawing on the analytic value of the proposed taxonomy, any exploration of law and emotion should strive to identify which emotion(s) it takes as its focus; distinguish implicated emotion-driven phenomena; explore relevant and competing theories of the emotions; limit itself to a particular type of legal doctrine; expose underlying theories of law; and make clear which legal actors are implicated. Directions for future research are discussed and cross-disciplinary collaboration encouraged.