Research summary
There is growing evidence that some proactive policing strategies have shown promising results in reducing crime. Most of these strategies are generally applied separately to address specific components of criminal behavior, while the involvement in the crime itself may be caused by different factors. This raises the question of whether an integrative approach that addresses these factors could be an appropriate approach to reduce involvement in the crime. Furthermore, most of these policing strategies have been applied toward regular crime; this leaves us with the question of whether these strategies would show similar results when political offenses are involved as well. Our study focuses on the political offense of stone‐throwing in East Jerusalem, usually by Palestinian teenage boys. We applied an integrative approach in one of the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which included strategies such as focused deterrence, place‐based policing, cognitive behavioral therapy, diversion to nonenforcement tracks, and interventions at the community level. We found a large and significant reduction in the targeted neighborhood compared to similar Palestinian neighborhoods. We have not found evidence of displacement, but rather evidence of significant diffusion of crime‐control benefits.
Policy implications
The results of the study suggest that an integrative approach that addresses the risks and needs of minority youth can help reduce their future involvement in political offenses. Furthermore, the implementation of promising strategies in the wider context of policing regular crimes may also be effective in responding to political offenses.
Studies on the criminal justice process up to the point of conviction show that defendants who belong to racially marginalized groups suffer a greater risk of being wrongfully convicted. However, little attention has been paid to the period after conviction. Applying multilevel analysis to data from the National Registry of Exonerations in the United States, we compare the length of the exoneration process for members of racially marginalized minority groups who are shown to have been wrongfully convicted compared with their counterparts from the white majority group. Our results indicate that exonerees from racially marginalized groups serve more time out of their sentence compared to those who are white. Further analysis shows that these differences exist only with respect to exonerees in Republican-controlled states. These findings suggest that not only are racially marginalized minorities wrongfully convicted at higher rates, as found in previous studies, but also that they suffer longer periods of unjustified punishment.
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