Domestically and globally females continue to be underrepresented in policing, despite their greater likelihood of advancing themselves through higher education, driving organizational change, and being less likely to use excessive force or be named in civil litigation than their male counterparts. Extant research indicates that women may be effectively gated from policing by a subculture that aggrandizes characteristics consistent with the crime-fighting paradigm. Using qualitative data from in-depth interviews with female officers, this study investigates the female officer experience of police subculture in terms of masculinity, gender disparities, and sexualized activities. To understand the perceived environment of the department and contextualize it within the literature, the dominance of masculine personality traits and gender disparities within the department are first explored to determine whether a hypermasculine subculture was present. Then, female officers’ definitions of sexual harassment, their roles in these activities, and their motivations for participation were examined.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Anderson's thesis of a code of the street has been broadly applied to the study of violence, but race- and gender-specific multilevel analyses of gun violence are scant within the literature. An unresolved debate also surrounds the link between violent victimization and adherence to street culture; underscored by an apparent reputation-victimization paradox among those who engage in street behaviors. The current study contributes to the literature by assessing the direct influence of incident setting and victim-offender familiarity on the likelihood of gun use by Black males in the course of aggravated assaults; and the degree to which the confluence of these factors is conditioned by levels of disadvantage and violence in the community. To accomplish this, we apply hierarchical generalized linear modeling to incident-level data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System in conjunction with contextual-level data from the counties in which the incidents are nested. Our findings suggest victim-offender familiarity and public settings are negatively associated with gun violence and the confluence of these factors further reduces the probability of gun use. This relationship, however, is conditioned by levels of disadvantage and violence in the community, providing preliminary evidence of both the violence increasing and decreasing effects of street culture hypothesized by Anderson.

Research exploring attitudes toward the death penalty is common in the field of criminal justice. Additionally, a substantial body of literature has examined public perceptions of sex offenders and punishment in the U.S. Unfortunately, few studies have sought to examine perceptions of the death penalty in relation to sexual offending. This study contributes to the literature by examining perceptions of the college students at a mid-sized university in the Southeastern United States as they relate to support for the death penalty in cases of sexual assault across victim age categories. Findings suggest that respondent perceptions are shaped by biological sex, political affiliation, college major, fear of crime, and parents’ level of education, and these relationships are uniform across victim age categories. Further, support for the death penalty appears inversely related with victim age.

The sexual victimization of adult males remains an understudied subject within criminology. Prior research has generally been restricted to descriptive analysis of small clinical samples and inmate populations. Using general strain theory (GST), this study examines the simultaneous influence of community- and incident-level factors on the likelihood of weapon use and victim injury in cases of adult male sexual victimization. This study applies hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) to 2,155 cases of sexual victimization of adult males nested within 113 U.S. cities. Community-level data are procured from the 2011-2015 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year summary file and incident-level data are taken from cases of sexual violence contained in the 2011-2015 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Findings demonstrate moderate support for GST as a framework through which to examine male sexual victimization, as community levels of disadvantage/violence and ethnic heterogeneity, as well as offender gender, race, intoxication, and weapon use each exhibit statistically significant relations with crime severity. This study finds that community and situational context are each important in predicting weapon use and victim injury, demonstrating the need to further explore male sexual victimization from a multilevel perspective.

Recent literature has described a rise in the activity of right-wing extremists in the United States. Several studies have examined this phenomenon in relation to the actions of President Trump. Comparatively, little research has examined the impact of the Obama presidency on right-wing extremism despite a peak in the number of right-wing extremist groups during his second term. Using a power-threat framework, this study examines the unique effects of the presidential candidacies and elections of Obama and Trump on the frequency of attacks committed by right-wing extremists in the U.S. as documented in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) modeling is applied to monthly counts ( n = 151) of 141 domestic terrorist attacks committed by right-wing extremists that occurred in the U.S. between June 3, 2006, and December 31, 2018. Consistent with the political threat hypothesis, our findings indicate that the re-election of President Obama was associated with a gradual, permanent increase in the frequency of attacks by right-wing extremists. Yet, none of the intervention components associated with his first candidacy or election were associated with statistically significant changes in right-wing terrorist attacks. In contrast, and in accordance with the emboldenment hypothesis, all intervention components associated with the candidacy and election of Donald Trump predicted permanent increases in the frequency of attacks—and most were abrupt in nature. In view of these findings, political leaders on the left and right must anticipate the ability of their rhetoric and behavior to both alienate and embolden extremist groups and individuals, particularly within the far-right. As our findings demonstrate, failure to do so risks contributing to increased activity among far-right extremists as a product of either political threat or emboldenment.