Detective Effort Among Complainant and Suspect Racial and Ethnic Dyads: An Exploration

• Published date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368719832957
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Detective Effort Among

Complainant and Suspect

Racial and Ethnic Dyads:

An Exploration

Seth Wyatt Fallik

1

, Danielle Victory

1

,

and Adam Dobrin

1

Abstract

The gap between citizen perceptions and the realities of police work is most pro-

nounced among detective work: Little, for example, is known about how detectives

use their investigative discretion. To overcome this issue within the context of race/

ethnicity, detectives reported the amount of time they worked assigned cases. These

data were paired with case file information containing the complainant and suspect’s

racial and ethnic identity. Dyads of complainant and suspect racial/ethnic arrange-

ments were explored to see whether there was a difference in the likelihood that a

case would be worked and for how long it was worked. The results were mixed:

There was no difference in the likelihood that a case would be worked or how long it

was worked across differing complainant racial/ethnic identities. Cases with a minority

suspect, however, were more likely to be worked and for longer periods of time. The

implications for these findings are discussed.

Keywords

race and policing, race/ethnicity, racial profiling, treatment by the police, race and

public opinion, criminal profiling, criminal investigations, detective work

Since only one in four citizens will come into contact with a police officer in any given

year, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Langton & Durose, 2013), most

citizen insights into policing are derived elsewhere. In fact, among 505 interviews

1

School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Seth Wyatt Fallik, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road,

SO 44, Suite 219, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA.

Email: sfallik@fau.edu

Race and Justice

ªThe Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/2153368719832957

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2022, Vol. 12(1) 28–\ 46

with Chicago residents in 2001, television programming, news media coverage, and

social media postings are where most people formulated their opinions about law

enforcement (Rosenbaum, Schuck, Costello, Hawkins, & Ring, 2005). These infor-

mation outlets can be somewhat problematic because they are often based on non-

systematic methodologies and/or nonempirically based standards. The saying in

journalism, for example, “if it bleeds, it leads” may unfairly represent the prevalence

of more violent occurrences. Nowhere is this more evident than the news media

coverage given to officer-involved shootings of unarmed Black men. Although the

disparity of racial and ethnic minorities at every stage of the criminal justice system is

well-documented in the extant literature (see DeLisi & Regoli, 2005; Peffley &

Hurwitz, 2010; Sampson & Lauritsen, 1997), police use-of-force statics are much

more modest (e.g., Engel, Sobol, & Worden, 2000; Lawton, 2007; McCluskey &

Terrill, 2005; Phillips & Smith, 2000; Sun & Payne, 2004).

Nevertheless, the vicarious experiences of citizens in these events have caused a

crisis of legitimacy in law enforcement, which has been observed in several nationally

representative studies (La Vigne, Fontaine, & Dwivedi, 2017; Newport, 2016). The

gap between citizen perceptions and the realities of policing is perhaps greatest for

criminal investigations. This part of the policing profession is often overlooked and,

when coupled with widely disseminated sensationalized and fictional accounts of

detective work, has contributed to several public and empirically documented mis-

understandings. Although a number of recent studies have begun to explore detective

work, none have done so within the context of race and/or ethnicity. This is surprising

given the contemporary discourse on race, policing, and procedural justice in

American society.

To address this issue, the current study explores race and ethnicity among detective

case processing times. In doing so, detectives (n¼184) from the Houston (TX) police

department (HPD) voluntarily provided information about the cases they were

working and the time they spent working them over a 60-day period. The criminal

investigations under review (n¼524) were disaggregated into racial and ethnic

identity dyads for the complainant and suspect in each case.

1

Chi-square analyses and

paired sample ttests from these subsets of data were estimated to observe whether a

cases’ likelihood of being worked and how long it was worked was significantly

different than would be expected among other complainant–suspect racial/ethnic

arrangements. Prior to exploring the data, this article begins by discussing the extant

literature on racial disparity in police–citizen contacts, detective discretion, investi-

gative effort hypotheses, and the empirical limits of our existing knowledge.

Racial Disparity in Police–Citizen Contacts

Racial disparity in the criminal justice system has been explored in a number of ways,

but policing scholars have been primarily drawn to bias that may exist in traffic

enforcement. Engel and Calnon (2004), in their analysis of 7,054 traffic stops with

police during a 6-month period, reported that queries of this nature are rooted in a

belief that targeting minorities for routine traffic stops is an “effective policing tactic”

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Fallik et al.