Morals influence whether police encounters deter young offenders

 

Police encounters do deter young offenders. The more often the police detect them, the more risk-aware they become, and the more likely they are to abstain from criminal activities. However, this is not equally true for all adolescents, but particularly for young people with low morals. These are the results of a recently published study led by Florian Kaiser, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg im Breisgau, which will play an important role in shaping police work. Kaiser was awarded the Best Article Award by the European Society of Criminology (ESC) for his publication, “Differential Updating and Morality: Is the Way Offenders Learn from Police Detection Associated with Their Personal Morals?”.

Previous criminological studies revealed that adolescents reconsider criminal actions and are more likely to abstain from criminal behaviour if they perceive the risk of being detected by the police to be high. In a new study involving around 1,400 adolescents, a group of researchers led by the Freiburg-based criminologist and sociologist Florian Kaiser have now explored the role of past police encounters and assessed which groups of adolescents are most likely to be influenced by such experiences. The comprehensive survey, “Crime in the modern City,” asked young people whether they had committed crimes in the past and, if so, to list how often the police had become aware of these crimes. In addition, the researchers asked the adolescents to assess the risk of being caught when committing various crimes and to evaluate these actions morally by indicating how wrong they considered each type of criminal behaviour.

The findings: not all young offenders who have previously been detected by the police are equally affected by the experience in terms of their risk perception. Those with weak morals — i.e., non-conforming morals that deviate from the law — showed a significantly increased perception of detection risk following police encounters. Conversely, previous police encounters have little influence on risk perception in adolescents with stronger morals. According to the researchers, this may be because those with strong morals may not need to be deterred in the first place, as they rarely or never consider committing crimes; consequently, risk perception is irrelevant to them. “Nevertheless, these differentiated results hold the potential to be of great importance for sanction research and police work,” explains Kaiser.

Previously, there was no consensus among experts on whether increased police deployment has a deterrent effect on young offenders. This new study suggests that police encounters do hold the potential to influence risk perception, at least in a specific group of adolescents. Kaiser's conclusion: “Ideally, these increased risk perceptions will prevent young people from committing further crimes.”