The Different Crime Solving Styles of Police Agencies across the United States.: A Latent Class Analysis of Criminal Inv
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The Different Crime Solving Styles of Police Agencies across the United States.: A Latent Class Analysis of Criminal Investigation Goals Yung Hyeock Lee 1 & Sujung Cho 2 Received: 14 March 2020 / Accepted: 28 July 2020/ # Southern Criminal Justice Association 2020
Abstract This study employed latent class analysis (LCA) to identify distinct subgroups of U.S. police agencies, each having a similar pattern of criminal investigation goals. Using a nationally representative sample of 1746 U.S. police agencies, including municipal, county sheriffs, and State police, this analysis yielded four subgroups: professional (32.5% of the sample), enforcing (25.2%), servicing (20.5%), and avoiding (21.8%). Results indicate that organizational level predictors of police policies and practices in the criminal investigation process, such as the roles of the public, investigative activities of patrol officers, management of detective work, and forensic support, vary across subgroups. All four variables were significant in predicting membership in the professional agencies when compared to the avoiding agencies. Also, the odds of belonging to the enforcing agencies, compared to avoiding agencies, were significantly increased for agencies with management of detective work and forensic support variables. Furthermore, the servicing agency class membership was significantly related to only forensic support variables, compared to the avoiding agencies. Finally, the mean clearance rates for robberies varied across classes, and the rate was highest in the professional agencies. Police agencies have their own crime-solving methods that predominantly reflect the organizational philosophy and values and also lead to differences in crime clearance rates. Keywords Crime solving goals . Police criminal investigation policies and practices .
Criminal investigation process . Latent class analysis . Clearance rates
Yung Hyeock Lee and Sujung Cho contributed equally to this work. Both Yung Hyeock Lee and Sujung Cho are co-first authors. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-02009558-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Yung Hyeock Lee [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
American Journal of Criminal Justice
Introduction A criminal investigation is the information-gathering process aimed to uncover what happened, how the crime was committed, by whom, so as to successfully prosecute the case (Horvath, Meesig, & Lee, 2001; Lee, 2020). The goals of police criminal investigations vary across agencies and states in the United States, but most police organizations aim to “identify criminal offenders and criminal activity and, where appropriate, to apprehend offenders and participate in subsequent court proceedings” (American Bar Association, 1973). Scholarly literature (Roberg & Kuykendall, 1990) suggests that the main goal of police criminal investigations is to increase the number of arrests, with
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