Toward a Theory of Police Effects

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12231
• Author: Francis T. Cullen,Travis C. Pratt
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• Date: 01 August 2016

POLICY ESSAY

DIRECTIONS IN DETERRENCE THEORY

AND POLICY

Toward a Theory of Police Effects

Francis T.Cullen

Trav is C. Prat t

University of Cincinnati

With the possible exception of the role that biology plays in criminal behavior,

few debates in criminology seem to get under scholars’ skin more than

the question of whether—or perhaps to what extent—the police “matter”

when it comes to controlling crime. Where it was once fashionable for scholars to

claim that the police do little to nothing to affect crime (Sherman, 1993a), the bulk of

the accumulated evidence now says otherwise (Reisig, 2010; Rosenfeld, Deckard, and

Blackburn, 2014; Wolfe, McLean, and Pratt, 2016). Granted, the effects are likely modest

(Braga, Papachristos, and Hureau, 2014; Braga, Welsh, and Schnell, 2015), but they are

no more modest than just about anything else the criminal justice system does to try to

control bad behavior (Mears, 2010; Worrall, 2015).

The most recent incarnation of the police–crime debate is that between Nagin, Solow,

and Lum (2015) and Pickett and Roche (2016: 727–751). This debate is complex, and

the field will undoubtedly benefit substantially as we all wrestle with how this group

of accomplished scholars are themselves thinking about this issue. But at the risk of

oversimplifying things, the gist of the disagreement at hand goes something like this: Nagin

et al. (2015) claim that increasing the number and targeted deployment of the police can

affect crime rates by elevating the objective probability of arrest for criminal behavior,which

in turn increases would-be offenders’ subjective appraisal of their risk of apprehension. As

such, perceived deterrence is a key mechanism for preventing the decision to offend. On the

other hand, Pickett and Roche (2016) argue that the link between people’s objective odds of

being arrested for a given crime often bears little resemblance to their perceived likelihood

of being caught and punished. Thus, they contend that a breakdown in the key factor

potentially linking greater police presence to lower crime—the increased perceived certainty

of punishment—translates into a breakdown in Nagin et al.’s (2015) core argument.

Direct correspondence to Francis T. Cullen, School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box

210389, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0389 (e-mail: cullenft@ucmail.uc.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12231 C2016 American Society of Criminology 799

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 3