Discovering Drug Crimes: Explaining Police Rationales for Initial Contact in Drug Stops Across Places

• In Event: Investigatory Stops by Police

Abstract

Even within the same department, the specific methods of policing employed by officers in their routine patrols vary by ecological context. This is especially true for the policing of drug crimes, as they afford greater room for officer discretion than do other types of offenses. However, scholars have yet to explore the extent to which place-based characteristics influence the assorted explanations that police provide for initiating contact with drug offenders at the time of arrest. Officers may report initiating contact through a drug sting operation, upon inadvertently witnessing a drug deal, in the course of a traffic stop, after observing behavior deemed suspicious, or on a call for another type of offense, for example. Using Contexts of Drug Enforcement (CODE) data, multinomial logit regression models are estimated to differentiate among police explanations for discovering drug crimes based on local levels of concentrated disadvantage, intensities and combinations of physical features of place, and incident-specific attributes, including time of day and type of drug.

Authors

• Walter Campbell, Rutgers University

• Elizabeth Griffiths, Rutgers University