Police Officers’ Schemata of Victims

• In Event: We Know Victim-Offender Overlap is “A Thing”: Now What?

Abstract

We know that people who are involved in criminal behavior are also more likely to be victimized; the overlap between victims and offenders, particularly in violence, is substantial. Little is known, however, about law enforcement practices with respect to such “dual-role victims,” in general, or about the practices that maximize victim cooperation and/or help-seeking. We conducted focus groups and convened incident reviews with patrol officers and detectives to understand the conceptual categories into which police classify victims and the basis and rationale guiding those decisions. Based on these data, we describe the cognitive schema that police apply to victims and explore whether the placement of dual-role victims in those schema is distinctive.

Authors

• Sarah J. McLean, The John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, Inc.

• Caitlin Dole, The John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety

• Robert E. Worden, University at Albany / John F. Finn Institute