conclusion for crime essay

Essay on Crime

Students are often asked to write an essay on Crime in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Crime

Understanding crime.

Crime refers to acts that violate the law. They are considered harmful and punishable by a governing authority. Crimes can range from theft to murder.

Types of Crimes

There are various types of crimes. Violent crimes include actions like assault, while theft falls under property crimes. White-collar crimes involve fraud or embezzlement.

Consequences of Crime

Crimes have severe consequences. They can lead to imprisonment, fines, or even death penalties. Moreover, they harm communities and individuals, causing fear and damage.

Preventing Crime

Preventing crime involves law enforcement, education, and community programs. Everyone can contribute to a safer society by obeying laws and reporting suspicious activities.

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250 Words Essay on Crime

Introduction.

Crime, a pervasive aspect of society, is an act that violates a law and is punishable by the state. It disruptively breaches societal norms, creating a sense of insecurity and fear. This essay delves into the nature of crime, its causes, and the role of law enforcement.

The Nature of Crime

Crime is a complex phenomenon, varying across cultures and societies. It ranges from minor offences like theft to severe ones like homicide. The nature of crime reflects societal values, as what is considered criminal is determined by the prevailing legal and moral code.

Causes of Crime

The causes of crime are multifaceted, involving biological, psychological, and sociological factors. Biological theories suggest genetic predispositions towards criminal behaviour. Psychological theories focus on the individual’s mental processes and their interaction with the environment. Sociological theories, on the other hand, emphasize societal structures and inequalities as major crime contributors.

Law Enforcement and Crime

Law enforcement agencies play a crucial role in maintaining order, preventing crime, and ensuring justice. They function as a deterrent, keeping potential criminals in check. However, their effectiveness is contingent upon their ability to adapt to evolving criminal tactics.

In conclusion, crime is a societal issue with deep roots in individual and social structures. Understanding its nature and causes is key to formulating effective strategies for prevention and control. As society evolves, so too must our approach to understanding and combating crime.

500 Words Essay on Crime

Crime, a social and legal concept, has been a part of human society since its inception. It refers to the actions that violate the norms and laws of a society, leading to harm or potential harm to individuals or the community. The study of crime, its causes, effects, and prevention, is a crucial aspect of sociology, psychology, and criminology.

Crime is a complex phenomenon, varying across societies and times. It is not static but evolves with societal norms and legal frameworks. What may be considered a crime in one society may not be in another, and similarly, what was a crime in the past might not be so today. For instance, homosexuality was once criminalized in many societies, but it is now widely accepted and decriminalized.

Types of Crime

Crimes are generally categorized into personal crimes, property crimes, inchoate crimes, statutory crimes, and financial crimes. Personal crimes involve direct harm or threat to an individual, such as assault or robbery. Property crimes involve interfering with another person’s property, like burglary or theft. Inchoate crimes are those that were started but not completed, while statutory crimes are violations of specific statutes. Financial crimes, such as fraud or embezzlement, involve the illegal conversion of property ownership.

The causes of crime are multifaceted, often interwoven with societal, psychological, and economic factors. Poverty, lack of education, substance abuse, and family violence are some common societal factors leading to crime. Psychological factors include personality disorders, low self-control, and aggression. Economic factors, such as unemployment or income inequality, also contribute significantly to crime rates.

Effects of Crime

Crime affects society in numerous ways, from creating fear and insecurity to damaging social cohesion. It impacts the economy by diverting resources towards law enforcement and away from other sectors. On an individual level, crime can lead to physical harm, psychological trauma, and financial loss.

Crime prevention strategies are as diverse as the causes of crime. They include social strategies, such as improving education and employment opportunities, and legal strategies, such as effective law enforcement and fair judicial systems. Psychological interventions, like counseling and therapy, can also play a significant role in crime prevention.

Understanding crime is essential to creating a safe and harmonious society. By examining its nature, types, causes, effects, and prevention, we can develop effective strategies to reduce crime rates and mitigate its impact on individuals and communities. It is a collective responsibility that requires the concerted efforts of individuals, communities, and governments.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Crime Against Women
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Essay on Crime Prevention

Crime is a global problem affecting each and every country. Every country suffers from increased crime rates which result to insecurities and a negative impact on the economy. This increased crime rate is fueled by poverty, parental negligence, low self-esteem, alcohol, and drug abuse, resulting from the lack of proper moral values (Topalli & Wright, 2014). Moral values are responsible for determining what is right and wrong and also establish what is socially acceptable. They are ideas considered by society as important and contribute to one’s general personality, and thus, without them, an individual is lost. It is significant to prevent crimes to raise the quality of life of all citizens. Preventing crimes also results to long-term benefits as it reduces social cost resulting from crimes and the costs involved with the formal criminal justice system. In order to prevent these crimes, there is the need to develop evidence-based and comprehensive approaches addressing several factors impacting crimes, including moral values on growing children.

Crimes result from negative moral values, and thus there is a need to promote positive youth development and wellbeing. Horace Mann believes that this prevalence of crime in society could be reduced by moral instruction in schools (Spring, 2019). He argues that for the crime rate to reduce, the moral value of the general public needs to be shaped accordingly. According to him, the most accurate method of doing this is by incorporating moral instruction in the education system. He referred to this method as putting a police officer in every child’s heart. This would enable the child to be conscious of the evil in society and be aware of good and bad. This would guide them as they grow up and prevent them from engaging or committing any crime.

The American Education book portrays crime as a global nuisance, and the more accurate and effective method to prevent it is through education. Mann suggests in this book that the number of police required by society would significantly be reduced by schooling. Thus, education is portrayed as a source of knowledge and a significant tool that would help reduce crime rates remarkably. It is supposed to do this by allowing students to acquire more educational attainment that leads to high paying jobs and thus higher earnings, which increases the opportunity cost of crime and consequently reducing crime. Mann also believes that education would reduce the crime rate by affecting individuals’ personality traits associated with crime. This is done by making students become patient, disciplined and moral. Despite this being a more suitable method of preventing crimes in society, it is not as effective as Mann and other researchers rate it.

Mann theory of preventing crime through schooling is a considerate method, but it is not enough to do so. There is no causal relationship between crime rates and school attendance (Lochner, 2020). It is assumed that schooling and crime rates are related, and thus if school attendance is increased, a consequent crime reduction would be noticed. However, this is wrong, and Mann theory has not proved a reality. According to Joel et al. (2021), the percentage of 5-to 17-years-old students increased from 82.2 in 1959-1960 to 91.9 percent in 2004-2005. The average days of attendance also increased from 160.2 in 1959-1960 to 169.2 in 1999-2000. There was also a rapid increase in violent crimes in 1960-2000 from 160.9 to 506.5 per 100,000 residence (Spring, 2019). As the number of students attending school and the attendance days increased from 1960 to 2004, so did the crime rate. This is proof that the crime rate is irrespective of the number of students going to school and the average days of attendance, and thus Mann theory is ineffective.

Moral value instruction is a vital tool to prevent crimes but implementing it only through schooling, such as Mann suggested, is not only a failing strategy but a waste of time and resources. Moral values in children need to be implemented in many different ways to ensure that they stick as they develop into adults (Damon, 2008). Implementing these moral values would ensure that they grow into morally upright adults, thus reducing crime rates. Implementing moral value through schooling is advised, but it would work with a combination of many other methods including through religion and good parenting. Religion helps in the spiritual growth of a person and emphasizes moral codes aimed to develop values such as social competence and self-control, which are major virtues in crime hating people. According to the study done by Brown and Taylor (2007) on how religion impacts child development, it was found that social competence and the psychological adjustment of third-graders were positive influenced with several religious factors. This shows that religion helps in developing children to become adults with a positive and better judgement that would keep them from engaging in any crime and thus would contribute to crime rate reduction.

Parents are responsible for their children, and they are required to guard and guide them as they contribute to their personality. According to Penn (2015), how a child turns out as an adult depends on how their parents brought them up. As a result of this, it is crucial for parents to be careful of how they handle their children. It is the responsibility of every citizen of a county to help fight and prevent crimes, and thus it is the responsibility of parents to reduce the crime rate by training their children to be better people in future. They should be consistent with rules and monitor their children behaviour to ensure that they instil good moral value in them, equipping them with the knowledge of good and evil. If a child is raised in a way that makes them hate crime, then they would not engage in any, and this would contribute to the general reduction of crime in the society.

In conclusion, the main way of preventing crime is by instilling positive moral values on growing children to ensure that they develop into morally upright adults who would not engage in criminal activities. It is assumed that to instil this moral values in children and prevent crimes in future, the best way is through schooling. But this is not the case as there is no causal relationship between crime rates and schooling, and thus schooling will not necessarily result to a reduced crime rate. In order to ensure that moral values are successfully instilled in children, schooling would have to be combined with other methods, some of which include religion and good parenting, resulting in adults who are conscious of good and evil. Increased crime rate is a problem experienced by all countries globally, and the only way to fight it is by shaping the personality of the future generation by instilling positive moral values as their driving force.

Topalli, V., & Wright, R. (2014).  Affect and the dynamic foreground of predatory street crime  (1st ed.).

Spring, J. (2019). American Education.  https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429274138

Lochner, L. (2020). Education and crime.  The Economics Of Education , 109-117.  https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-815391-8.00009-4

Joel, M., Bill, H., Jijun, Z., Xiaolei, W., Ke, W., & Sarah, H. et al. (2021).  National Center for Education Statistics: The Condition of Education 2019. NCES 2019-144 . ERIC. Retrieved 5 July 2021, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED594978.

Damon, W. (2008).  Moral child: Nurturing children’s natural moral growth  (3rd ed.). FREE Press.

Brown, S., & Taylor, K. (2007). Religion and education: Evidence from the National Child Development Study.  Journal Of Economic Behavior & Organization ,  63 (3), 439-460.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2005.08.003

Penn, H. (2015).  Understanding early childhood  (3rd ed.). Open University Press.

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Crime As A Social Problem: How To Write An Essay?

Table of Contents

Nevertheless, the key to solving the problem lays deeply in it and only through research of every aspect of the problem it can be found. That is exactly why this topic is so popular! You have endless scopes to discover, various information to collect, numerous questions to find answers to, and freedom to compose any personal topic dealing with crime.

But still, all essays on crime are similar to their aim – to discover and to help. You need to realize that any cause-effect connections you may find can indeed help to understand the problem better, develop new methods of preventing, reducing or dealing with crimes and criminals and reveal many other useful things.

How to write crime essay?

Writing an essay on crime is almost the same as writing any other essay. However, remember that you need to be extremely precise with the information you include in your essay – it’s better to check the trustworthiness and accuracy of everything you decided to take on the Internet. What’s more, it is a good idea to rely on statistics and numbers.

Moreover, it is better to choose a specific topic for your essay – that’s how you make it informative and newsworthy. Picking too broad topic will result in writing about everything and nothing. At the same time, choosing a narrow topic may be difficult to write due to the lack of available information.

So, analyze your topic and find the golden middle. These are the main differences in a crime essay.

Here are some basic recommendations:

• Come up with the topic – not too narrow, not too broad, most importantly – interesting for you.
• Write an outline and stick to it – any essay needs to be structured both for easier writing and for better perception.
• Be interested in what you write about.

The best structure for the essay on crime

Any essay should contain three parts – introduction, main body, and conclusion. They may also consist of paragraphs for better understanding while reading. So when you have finally decided on your topic, it is nice to make an outline – it is where all parts of your essay will be highlighted.

Here is a free example of an outline for the essay “Correlations of criminal behavior”:

1. Introduction – here you present all the background information needed to understand your ideas, it is the basis of your research. You may also give some definitions if needed.

2. The main body – to state all your ideas.

• Gender – discover who does more crimes, men or women. Try to explain or find explanations for the question “why”.
• Race and immigration – examine people of which race is more likely than others committing crimes. Also, explore how can the status of immigrant influence criminality.
• Early life – enumerate which factors in early life may be associated with committing crimes later. These may include trauma, family size and relations, alcohol and drug addiction in the family, bullying, low school performance, and many others.
• Religion – there are a few studies about how religiosity may influence criminality. Discover whether religion increase or decrease crime, how and why. Maybe, different religions have different effects.
• Political ideology – explore various political ideologies and how they encourage people to behave themselves. Are there any which obviously push people into committing a crime?
• Psychological traits – explain how psychological background may influence a person. Describe some mental illnesses which may make people aggressive and destructive. Find some statistics to prove your statements.
• Socioeconomic factors – examine people of which social or economic status are more prone to commit a crime, why? Explain also how the economic situation in family, city, and country may influence criminality. You may even write a poverty and crime essay.

3. Conclusion – make a derivation of everything you have stated. Keep in mind that no new ideas or statements are needed here.

4. References – add a list of the sources you have used in your essay (if needed).

Causes of crime essay

It is doubtless that the government and authorities try to prevent crimes (which is a great idea, by the way!).

Nevertheless, it is still occurring.

The problem with this is that the majority of people can’t understand where it all comes from. To cope with the problem we need to spread the awareness of why crime is done because “just insanity” isn’t usually the answer.

If you decided to write such an essay, here are some ideas for you to consider in your essay:

• Physical abnormalities – it is still believed that people who encounter some features of appearance are more likely to commit a crime. It is stated that these people have smaller heads, bigger jaws, and ears and are of a certain weight and height. Another determining factor is race.
• Mental illnesses and psychological disorders – there are some illnesses which make people generally more aggressive.
• Social and economic factors – it is a well-known fact that people of lower social status commit more crimes. The same is with the economy – the poorer the country is, the more crime is committed.
• Income and education – it was revealed that educated people are less likely to commit a crime compared to those who are uneducated. What is more, unemployment is regarded as one of the most widespread reasons for crime.
• White-collar crime – it is a prevalent crime among deputies and high officials. They include bribery, abuse of status, bureaucracy, and others.

Hate crime essay: what’s best to cover?

Hate crime is committed against a group of people or someone who belongs to it. As a rule, race and religion are the main factors. Hate crime itself is a violent act towards a person or a group of people due to their affiliation with a group or organization.

Thousands of people all around the world are suffering since they just profess the religion someone doesn’t like, have another color of skin or encounter some even less noticeable differences. Consider writing a does the death penalty deter crime essay in this context.

Thus this type of crime is indeed worth highlighting. Here is a free sample for you to pick some ideas.

Cybercrime essay: several hints

Cybercrime is a relatively new problem which develops with the Internet and technologies. Only fifteen years ago there wasn’t such a problem. However, it is expected that the global cost of cybercrime will surmount $6 trillion!

Most widespread types of cybercrime include fraud, hacking, identity theft, scamming, computer viruses, ransomware, DDoS attack, botnets, spamming, phishing, social engineering, malvertising, cyberstalking, software piracy, cyberbullying and many others.

This is why the topic is really up-to-date. So you may look through this free example to know where to begin this broad topic.

Final thoughts

All in all, crime is a newsworthy scope to explore and write essays on. Unfortunately, crimes are constantly occurring, and there are lots of information and statistics you may need to discover some specific questions.

Don’t hesitate to examine something you’re really interested in, no matter how “important” it is considered! Good luck!

Can’t wait to fight all the crime around the globe? We’ll help! Order your perfect essay on crime and cut yourself free for anything you have on your mind.

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Essay Samples on Crime

Even if you are not majoring in Criminology, Law, or Forensic studies, dealing with the subject of crime can be inevitable. It’s always helpful if you can start your writing through the lens of legislation. It will help your readers understand more about the crime. See our free crime essay examples that will address numerous issues and disciplines. For example, some assignments below also focus on a cultural part of the crime like wearing a hoodie and dealing with racial prejudice. You will find several historical crime topics included to help you cover a wider range of things. If you would like to address similar topics, these free samples will help you choose a subject. You can use these as a template for your writing. These are also helpful as you learn how to structure essays on crime. See how each introduction tends to provide a brief explanation before resulting in a thesis statement. If you are working with a case study or court hearings, you can seek similar case studies to help yourself compare things. You must choose your topic first and then look through our free samples on crime to see how things have been approached in practice.

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Did you know that the shampoo you use was probably shoved down the throat of a rabbit, mouse, or maybe even a dog? Cosmetic animal testing is an injustice that few people dare talk about in our society. For those few who do talk about...

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Animal testing includes doing logical tests on animals when growing new items or medications. It can also be used in classrooms for educational purposes, as noted in collins dictionary, 2021. Testing can be used for research because some animals have the same DNA as humans...

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Introduction We think of animals as cute or vicious creatures, but do we really know how they are suffering? My research question is, 'To what extent should animals protected be by the law?'. This is an interesting question, as there will be different people who...

Animal Testing: Inefficient & Inhumane Way to Develop New Medications

Introduction To detect how safe a drug, vaccine, or cosmetic product is for human use many companies take advantage of animal testing for their products. Not only rodents and rabbits are commonly used for these medical experiments but also birds, dogs, and cats.     A country...

Preventing Cyberbullying by Forbidding Texting

Globalization has amplified the spread of technology across borders created the world smaller and additional interconnected. It can be reached anywhere through a telecommunications line and also comes to the laptop by converting the analog signal into a digital signal. This has brought uncounted advantages...

• Human Sexual Behavior

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Abstract: One of the undeniable factors of technological era is that social media is an integral part of modern community. In our modern world, especially children and teenagers are active users of these networks. Sometimes this utilization can become an addiction and have a bad...

Sexual Assault and Violence on College Campuses

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• Sexual Assaults

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Sexual hormones have proven to be a dangerous influencer in the body of human beings. It can affect everything from an individual’s mood, behavior, and countless other things. The environment that a person lives in and the people that person surrounds themselves with, these sexual...

• Jeffrey Dahmer
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Jeffrey Dahmer was born to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His mother described him as a beautiful baby, and he was considered a healthy child by both parents. He was fascinated by the bones of animals and how they...

Dissecting the Trial of the Serial Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer

Jeffrey Dahmer surprised, sickened, captivated, and puzzled the nation when he was detained in 1991 for atrocious crimes that comprised the homicide, mutilation, rape, and cannibalism of 17 men. He was finally convicted and sentenced to fifteen uninterrupted life terms for the offenses, then murdered...

The Serial Offender's Profile of Jeffrey Dahmer

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Jeffrey Dahmer: The Childhood and Capture of the Infamous Killer

Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous maneater, was the killer of 17 young men and boys. He enjoyed raping them, dismembering their bodies, having sex with their corpses, and building altars with their skulls. Though he can be described to have a normal childhood, Jeffrey Dahmer’s soul...

Children Are Not Criminals: Lowering the Age of Responsibility

The Philippine government is proposing a new law regarding the lowering of age on criminal liability from fifteen years old to nine years old, however, children at the time of the commission of the offense shall be exempted from criminal liability because they are just...

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The Reformation of the Age of Responsibility in England and Wales

In the 19th Century with the introduction of reformatories and industrial schools in England and Wales, there have been many transformations in order to deal with young people who offend. There has been continuous political turmoil and uncertainty over the most appropriate solution to best...

Do Violent Video Games Cause Behavior Problems

A very big debate about video games has been going on where people argue about whether video games cause behavioral problems or not. I claim that video games don’t cause problems because they improve brain capacity rather than causing behavioral problems, Video games unite people...

• Impact of Video Games
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Why Juveniles Should Not Be Tried As Adults

Furthermore, children that commit crimes are products of their environment in which they live. For example, when children constantly get sexually abused, it causes immense amounts of trauma and a false sense of love. Often a traumatic experience for all is an offense punishable by...

Drugs and Drug Policy In America: Relationship Between Drugs and Crime

The assortment of crimes that remain affiliated with drug use span from aggressive (such as homicide and aggravated assault) to greed (burglary, counterfeit, and deception) to distinct drug-law violations. Also, crimes such as bribery and corruption stay related to drug use as a result of...

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Expressive Art: Is Graffiti Art Or Vandalism

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Death Penalty As a Cruel and Unusual Punishment

George Walker Bush, a former U.S. president, and governor of Texas, once spoke, “I don’t think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge. I don’t think that’s right. I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people’s...

• American Government
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Sexual Harassment In The Workplace, Does It Exist In Lebanon

What is sexual harassment in the workplace? What actions count as sexual harassment? Is it considered a crime? What legitimate conducts can be applied if someone was exposed to sexual harassment? Sexual harassment does not necessarily mean sex. It is about having control over the...

• Workplace Violence

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You are sitting in a chair, waiting, about to be executed. You’re innocent, but that doesn’t matter now. You’re injected with a needle, which has a dangerous mixture of illegal drugs. You feel like fire is shooting through your veins, but you’re unable to speak...

My Pro-Life Position: Abortion is Murdering

Abortion is a topic that has captivated American citizens for years now, and there is considerable evidence that shows how abortion is murdering a human being. I want to show you that rape isn’t a reason for aborting a child, women should not be able...

• Individual Rights
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Death Penalty: The Cruelty of American Penal System

Imagine your loved ones or yourself going through capital punishment.. being sentenced to death creating fear in an individual's mind. It is said by Roger Hood, “Capital punishment is also known as the death penalty execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction by...

Are Video Games Doing More Harm Than Good

Video games are one of the most popular sources of entertainment in today’s world, there are many different types of games made for people of different ages. As technology gets more advanced, these games get better and more interesting. Some people believe that video is...

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Death Penalty Should not Be Abolished

Given the global tragedies and massacres which have occurred in today’s society, where do you stand on the death penalty? This option is still accessible in 31 out of 50 states. For more than 50 years no one in the united states has been executed...

Why Guns Shouldn't Be In College

In this generation, shootings are just another ordinary event that happens every week or every month. More and more people are feeling unsafe everywhere they go because of how outrageous people act. Sometimes if people get frustrated or angry, they take out their aggression on...

Why Guns Should Be Banned In America

You are standing on a bloody battlefield, just like somewhere in Afghanistan. But as you look closer, you realize that this is no battlefield this is the neighborhood where you live in. How has this happened? It is all because a random person was able...

Why Guns Should Not Be Banned

Living in a world with nonstop rivalries, political unrest, and uneasiness, the topic of gun ownership remains one of the most controversial topics. Our world can argue right or wrong, politically left or right, and yes or no, but safety and security is wanted throughout...

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One major concern that’s spiking up in the United States Army is sexual harassment and sexual assault. Soldiers and family members from all over the world are facing some type of unwanted desire, whether it’s verbal, non-verbal, or physical. Female green suitors are at a...

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Video games are the games played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a monitor or other display (Oxford advance learner’s dictionary, 1948). The Scholars mentioned that violent video games cause short-term or long-term increases in aggression and violent behavior of children with different...

Objectification Of Women: A Problem That Keeps Growing

Sexualization of women has been the longest ongoing war that the female world has been fighting against and it shows no sign of letting up. Women, not only in America but all over the world, for many years, have been used and referred to as...

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The rising population of inmates with mental illness is steadily rising, 'Today, some 283,800 state and local inmates are identified as having a mental illness, representing 16% of the inmate populations”. The rising epidemic of prisoners with a mental illnesses is beginning to complicate many...

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Effects Of Violent Video Gaming On Human Behavior

There are many various kinds of games and consoles within the world and vying worldwide. Video play has become a very common trade all over the world and has been growing exceptionally throughout the past twenty years. Gamers that are obsessed with online play are...

Somali Piracy: How To Protect Ships

Piracy is an illegal activity that is done through boats by assaulting other boats to steal cargo and other expensive goods on coastal areas. It is believed that sea piracy was established when human started using the sea for trading. Piracy consists of kidnapping for...

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The Concept of Mortifying and Scarring Experience for the Victim

I will be diving into the chilling theme of 'spiking' as it is called nowadays and how it can be a mortifying and scarring experience for the victim. I will delve into the mind of a person that feels the need to do these unlawful...

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Factors to Prevent Piracy Issues in Maritime Industry

The problem of piracy has had a negative impact on both commercial and humanitarian aid shipping, as a result of rising commodity prices, income from commercial activities are being disrupted, and caused delays in the delivery of humanitarian assistance and increased costs. The economic impact...

Classicism Beliefs and Crime With Rational Punishment

“The criminal commits it” will be reviewed under Classicism. Classism originated from the belief that crime was a product of free will, which resulted in many classical theorists assuming a Rational Choice Theory perspective. The forefront of Classicism is to link crime with rational punishment,...

Corporal Punishment: Main Concepts and Structure of Problem Analysis

Currently, to alleviate the negative consequences that arise from corporal punishment, some countries have implemented certain laws to ban the act of corporal punishment. For example, on 27 June 2019, Kosovo has passed a bill with article 24 of the law being implemented on child...

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Who sits at the nerve center of society makes all the difference and A great man is the one who represents a great ganglion in the nerves of that society, or, to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history and part...

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There are a lot of mixed opinions surrounding the idea of the death penalty. In the 1990’s, nearly 80% of the public approved Capital Punishment, while about 5% of were undecided and the other 15% opposed it. Is it fair to those who have done...

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Prostitution, or the more correct term, “sex work”, is defined as “the consensual provision of sexual services for money or goods” by the World Health Organization. Sex work is a complex social issue that is constantly changing in terms of social perceptions and legal frameworks....

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Crime is as old as human civilization. Since time immemorial crime has been with us in different degrees. Every society has a pattern of suitable conduct and some human beings in every society fallen outside this configuration. It is the reality which we can accept...

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The Great Depression created a tremendous amount of difficulties to many families during the early 1900s. With unemployment skyrocketing, homes were being lost and these families were left with barely enough to get by. Some packed up and journeyed West in pursuit of new opportunities,...

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Unsolicited Electronic Communication and Child Pornography

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Automation: Stealing Jobs or Creating Them

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Loads of Different Social Engineering Attacks

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• Social Engineering

Gangs and Victimization in the Community

In this essay we explain about the effects of gangs to the people and community. Gangs by and large have been observed to be at expanded danger of exploitation, in spite of the fact that the purposes behind this relationship have not completely been investigated....

Stanford Prison Experiment Violent Behavior

Discuss what may drive people toward violent behavior against others based on Milgram's experiment and Stanford prison experiment. A particularly alarming trend of increasing violence is observed in modern society. In recent years, the whole world literally swept a wave of violence. It penetrated into...

• Stanford Prison Experiment

Prevention of Car Accidents and Road Injury

Road injury is the most undesirable matter to occur to a street user, even though they occur quite frequently. The unfortunate thing is we do not learn from our errors on street. The majority of the street users are very well aware of the overall...

• Car Accident
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Psychological Crime Causations in Al Capone’s Criminal History

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Social Isolation, Violence and Relationship Breakdown

Mental disorder or psychopathy are terms accustomed refer psychological pattern that happens in an exceedingly very private and is often associated with distress or disability that's not expected as part of normal development or culture. In line with DSM-IV, a upset is additionally a psychological...

• Social Isolation

Purview of The Bureau’s Examination of Al Capone

The investigative purview of the Bureau of Examination amid the 1920s and early 1930s was more constrained than it is presently, and the group fighting, and thefts of the period were not inside the Bureau’s investigative specialist. The Bureau’s examination of Al Capone emerged from...

• Criminal Profiling

Laziness as an Enemy of Caution and Security

A great enemy of caution and security is laziness. The lazy person can never arrange his own success and security because he cannot use the right opportunity to work due to the nature of his laziness and remains lazy throughout life. Crooks and sly people...

• Social Security

The Polygraph for Modern-Day Police Work

In times of stressful or scary situations, humans tend to have a fight or flight response to whatever is happening to them and that response is exactly what polygraphs were invented to measure. The first recorded machine that is similar to the modern-day polygraph used...

• Criminology

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Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (2018)

Chapter: 8 conclusions and implications for policy and research, 8 conclusions and implications for policy and research.

Proactive policing is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. In this report, the committee used the term “proactive policing” to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Specifically, the elements of proactivity include an emphasis on prevention, mobilizing resources based on police initiative, and targeting the broader underlying forces at work that may be driving crime and disorder. This contrasts with the standard model of policing, which involves an emphasis on reacting to particular crime events after they have occurred, mobilizing resources based on requests coming from outside the police organization, and focusing on the particulars of a given criminal incident.

Proactive policing in this report is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. This report has documented that proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of approaches that have spread across the landscape of policing.

The United States has once again been confronted by a crisis of confidence in policing. Instances of perceived or actual police misconduct have given rise to nationwide protests against unfair and abusive police practices. Although this report was not intended to respond directly to the crisis of confidence in policing that can be seen in the United States today, it is nevertheless important to consider how proactive policing strategies may bear upon this crisis. It is not enough to simply identify “what works” for reducing crime and disorder; it is also critical to consider issues such as how proactive policing affects the legality of policing, the evaluation of the police in communities, potential abuses of police authority, and the equitable application of police services in the everyday lives of citizens.

Proactive policing has taken a number of different forms over the past two decades, and these variants often overlap in practice. The four broad approaches to proactive policing described in this report are place-based interventions, problem-solving interventions, person-focused interventions, and community-based interventions (see Table 2-1 in Chapter 2 ). Place-based interventions capitalize on the growing research base that shows that crime is concentrated at specific places within a city as a means of more efficiently allocating police resources to reduce crime. Its main applications have been directed at microgeographic hot spots. Person-based interventions also capitalize on the concentration of crimes to proactively prevent crime, but in this case it is concentration among a subset of offenders. Person-based interventions focus on high-rate criminals who have been identified as committing a large proportion of the crime in a community. Problem-solving innovations focus on specific problems that are viewed as contributing to crime incidence and that can be ameliorated by the police. In this case, a systematic approach to solve problems is used to prevent future crime. Finally, community-based interventions emphasize the role of the community in doing something about crime problems. Community approaches look to strengthen collective efficacy in the community or to strengthen the bonds between the police and the community, as a way of enhancing informal social controls and increasing cooperation with the police, with the goal of preventing crime.

In this concluding chapter, the committee summarizes the main findings for each of the four areas on which the report has focused: law and legality, crime control, community impacts, and racial disparities and racially biased behavior. For each area, we list the main conclusions reached (the conclusions are numbered according to the report chapter in which they were developed) and then provide a final, summary discussion of the findings. We then turn to the broader policy implications of the report as a whole. Finally, we offer suggestions for filling research gaps in order to strengthen the knowledge base regarding proactive policing and its impacts.

LAW AND LEGALITY

CONCLUSION 3-1 Factual findings from court proceedings, federal investigations into police departments, and ethnographic and theoretical arguments support the hypothesis that proactive strategies that use aggressive stops, searches, and arrests to deter criminal activity may decrease liberty and increase violations of the Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection Clause; proactive policing strategies may also affect the Fourth Amendment status of policing conduct. However, there is not enough direct empirical evidence on the relationship between particular policing strategies and constitutional violations to draw any conclusions about the likelihood that particular proactive strategies increase or decrease constitutional violations.

CONCLUSION 3-2 Even when proactive strategies do not violate or encourage constitutional violations, they may undermine legal values, such as privacy, equality, and accountability. Empirical studies to date have not assessed these implications.

However effective a policing practice may be in preventing crime, it is impermissible if it violates the law. The most important legal constraints on proactive policing are the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause (of the Fourteenth Amendment), and related statutory provisions.

Although proactive policing strategies do not inherently violate the Fourth Amendment, any proactive strategy could lead to Fourth Amendment violations to the degree that it is implemented by having officers engage in stops, searches, and arrests that violate constitutional standards. This risk is especially relevant for stop, question, and frisk (SQF); broken windows policing; and hot spots policing interventions if they use an aggressive practice of searches and seizures to deter criminal activity.

In addition, in conjunction with existing Fourth Amendment doctrine, proactive policing strategies may limit the effective strength or scope of constitutional protection or reduce the availability of constitutional remedies. For example, when departments identify “high crime areas” pursuant to place-based proactive policing strategies, courts may allow stops by officers of individuals within those areas that are based on less individualized behavior than they would require without the “high crime” designation. In this way, geographically oriented proactive policing may lead otherwise identical citizen-police encounters to be treated differently under the law.

The Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal and impartial treatment of citizens by government actors. It governs all policies, decisions, and acts taken by police officers and departments, including those in furtherance

of proactive policing strategies. As a result, Equal Protection claims may arise with respect to any proactive policing strategy to the degree that it discriminates against individuals based on their race, religion, or national origin, among other characteristics. Since most policing policies today do not expressly target racial or ethnic groups, most Equal Protection challenges require proving discriminatory purpose in addition to discriminatory effect in order to establish a constitutional violation.

Specific proactive policing strategies such as SQF and “zero tolerance” versions of broken windows policing have been linked to violations of both the Fourth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause by courts in private litigation and by the U.S. Department of Justice in its investigations of police departments. Ethnographic studies and theoretical arguments further support the idea that proactive strategies that use aggressive stops, searches, and arrests to deter criminal activity may decrease liberty and increase Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection violations. However, empirical evidence is insufficient—using the accepted standards of causality in social science—to support any conclusion about whether proactive policing strategies systematically promote or reduce constitutional violations. In order to establish a causal link, studies would ideally determine the incidence of problematic behavior by police under a proactive policy and compare that to the incidence of the same behavior in otherwise similar circumstances in which a proactive policy is not in place.

However, even when proactive strategies do not lead to constitutional violations, they may raise concerns about deeper legal values such as privacy, equality, autonomy, accountability, and transparency. Even procedural justice policing and community-oriented policing, neither of which are likely to violate legal constraints on policing (and, to the extent that procedural justice operates as intended, may make violations of law less likely), may, respectively, undermine the transparency about the status of police-citizen interactions and alter the structure of decision making and accountability in police organizations.

CRIME AND DISORDER

The available scientific evidence suggests that certain proactive policing strategies are successful in reducing crime and disorder. This important conclusion provides support for a growing interest among American police in innovating to develop effective crime prevention strategies. At the same time, there is substantial heterogeneity in the effectiveness of different proactive policing interventions in reducing crime and disorder. For some types of proactive policing, the evidence consistently points to effectiveness, but for others the evidence is inconclusive. Evidence in many cases is

restricted to localized crime prevention impacts, such as specific places, or to specific individuals. There is relatively little evidence-based knowledge about whether and to what extent the approaches examined in this report will have crime prevention benefits at the larger jurisdictional level (e.g., a city as a whole, or even large administrative areas such as precincts within a city) or across all offenders. One key problem that needs to be examined in this regard, but which has not been studied so far, is the degree to which specific policing programs create “opportunity costs” in terms of the allocation of police or policing resources in other domains. Furthermore, the crime prevention outcomes that are observed are mostly observed in the short term, and the evidence seldom addresses long-term crime-prevention outcomes.

It is important to note here that, in practice, police departments typically implement crime-reduction programs that include elements typical of several prevention strategies, as those strategies are defined for this report (see Chapter 2 ). Given this hybridization of tactics in practice, the committee’s review of the evidence was often hindered by the overlapping character of the real-world proactive policing interventions evaluated in many of the published research studies.

Place-Based Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-1 The available research evidence strongly suggests that hot spots policing strategies produce short-term crime-reduction effects without simply displacing crime into areas immediately surrounding targeted locations. Hot spots policing studies that do measure possible displacement effects tend to find that these programs generate a diffusion of crime-control benefits into immediately adjacent areas. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of hot spots policing strategies on crime and on possible jurisdictional outcomes.

CONCLUSION 4-2 At present, there are insufficient rigorous empirical studies on predictive policing to support a firm conclusion for or against either the efficacy of crime prediction software or the effectiveness of any associated police operational tactics. It also remains difficult to distinguish a predictive policing approach from hot spots policing at small geographic areas.

CONCLUSION 4-3 The results from studies examining the introduction of closed circuit television camera schemes are mixed, but they tend to show modest outcomes in terms of property crime reduction at high-crime places for passive monitoring approaches.

CONCLUSION 4-4 There are insufficient studies to draw conclusions regarding the impact of the proactive use of closed circuit television on crime and disorder reduction.

Policing has always had a geographic or place-based component, especially in how patrol resources are allocated for emergency response systems. However, over the past three decades scholars and the police have begun to recognize that crime is highly concentrated at specific places. Following this recognition, a series of place-based strategies have been developed in policing. In contrast to the focus of the standard model of policing, proactive place-based policing calls for a refocusing of policing on very small, “microgeographic” units of analysis, often termed “crime hot spots.” A number of rigorous evaluations of hot spots policing programs, including a series of randomized controlled trials, have been conducted.

The available research evidence suggests that hot spots policing interventions generate statistically significant short-term crime-reduction impacts without simply displacing crime into areas immediately surrounding the targeted locations. Instead, hot spots policing studies that do measure possible displacement effects tend to find that these programs generate a diffusion-of-crime-control benefit into immediately adjacent areas. While the evidence base is strong for the benefits of hot spots policing in ameliorating local crime problems, there are no rigorous field studies of whether and to what extent this strategy will have jurisdictionwide impacts.

Predictive policing also takes a place-based approach, but it focuses greater concern on predicting the future occurrence of crimes in time and place. It relies upon sophisticated computer algorithms to predict changing patterns of future crime, often promising to be able to identify the exact locations where crimes of specific types are likely to occur next. While this approach has potential to enhance place-based crime prevention approaches, there are at present insufficient rigorous empirical studies to draw any firm conclusions about either the efficacy of crime prediction software or the effectiveness of any associated police operational tactics. Moreover, it remains difficult to distinguish the police actions used in a predictive policing approach from hot spots policing at small geographic areas.

Another technology relevant to improving police capacity for proactive intervention at specific places is closed circuit television (CCTV), which can be used either passively or proactively. The results from studies examining the introduction of CCTV camera schemes are mixed, but they tend to show modest outcomes in terms of property crime reduction at high-crime places for passive monitoring approaches. Again, the committee did not find evidence that would allow us to estimate whether CCTV implemented as a jurisdictionwide strategy would have meaningful impacts on crime in that jurisdiction. As far as the proactive use of CCTV is concerned, there

are insufficient studies to draw conclusions regarding the impact of this strategy on crime and disorder.

Problem-Solving Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-5 There is a small group of rigorous studies of problem-oriented policing. Overall, these consistently show that problem-oriented policing programs lead to short-term reductions in crime. These studies do not address possible jurisdictional impacts of problem-oriented policing and generally do not assess the long-term impacts of these strategies on crime and disorder.

CONCLUSION 4-6 A small but rigorous body of evidence suggests that third party policing generates short-term reductions in crime and disorder; there is more limited evidence of long-term impacts. However, little is known about possible jurisdictional outcomes.

Problem-solving strategies such as problem-oriented policing and third party policing use an approach that seeks to identify causes of problems that engender crime incidents and draws upon innovative solutions to those problems to assess whether the solutions are effective. Problem-oriented policing uses a basic iterative process of problem identification, analysis, response, assessment, and adjustment of the response (often called the SARA [scanning, analysis, response, and assessment] model). This approach provides a framework for uncovering the complex mechanisms at play in crime problems and for developing tailored interventions to address the underlying conditions that cause crime problems in specific situations. Despite its popularity as a crime-prevention strategy, there are surprisingly few rigorous program evaluations of problem-oriented policing.

Much of the available evaluation evidence consists of non-experimental analyses that find strong associations between problem-oriented interventions and crime reduction. Program evaluations also suggest that it is difficult for police officers to fully implement problem-oriented policing. Many problem-oriented policing projects are characterized by weak problem analysis and a lack of non-enforcement responses to targeted problems. Nevertheless, even these limited applications of problem-oriented policing have been shown by rigorous evaluations to generate statistically significant short-term crime prevention impacts.

Third party policing draws upon the insights of problem solving, but also leverages “third parties” who are believed to offer significant new resources for preventing crime and disorder. Using civil ordinances and civil courts or the resources of private agencies, police departments engaged in third party policing recognize that much social control is exercised by

institutions other than the police (e.g., public housing agencies, property owners, parents, health and building inspectors, and business owners) and that crime can be managed through coordination with agencies and in ways other than enforcement responses under the criminal law. Though there are only a small number of program evaluations, the impact of third party policing interventions on crime and disorder has been assessed using randomized controlled trials and rigorous quasi-experimental designs. The available evidence suggests that third party policing generates statistically significant crime- and disorder-reduction effects. Related programs that employ Business Improvement Districts also show crime-prevention outcomes with long-term impacts, though research designs have been less rigorous in establishing causality.

Person-Focused Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-7 Evaluations of focused deterrence programs show consistent crime control impacts in reducing gang violence, street crime driven by disorderly drug markets, and repeat individual offending. The available evaluation literature suggests both short-term and long-term areawide impacts of focused deterrence programs on crime.

CONCLUSION 4-8 Evidence regarding the crime-reduction impact of stop, question, and frisk when implemented as a general, citywide crime-control strategy is mixed.

CONCLUSION 4-9 Evaluations of focused uses of stop, question, and frisk (SQF) (combined with other self-initiated enforcement activities by officers), targeting places with violence or serious gun crimes and focusing on high-risk repeat offenders, consistently report short-term crime-reduction effects; jurisdictional impacts, when estimated, are modest. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of focused uses of SQF on crime.

In the standard model of policing, the primary goal of police was to identify and arrest offenders after crimes had been committed. But beginning in the early 1970s, research evidence began to suggest that the police could be more effective if they focused on a relatively small number of chronic offenders. These studies led to innovations in policing based on the logic that crime prevention outcomes could be enhanced by focusing policing efforts on the small number of offenders who account for a large proportion of crime.

Offender-focused deterrence strategies, also known as “pulling levers,” attempt to deter crime among a particular offending population and are

often implemented in combination with problem-solving tactics. Offender-focused deterrence allows police to increase the certainty, swiftness, and severity of punishment in innovative ways. These strategies seek to change offender behavior by understanding the underlying crime-producing dynamics and conditions that sustain recurring crime problems and by implementing a blended strategy of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions.

A growing number of quasi-experimental evaluations suggest that focused deterrence programs generate statistically significant crime-reduction impacts. Robust crime-control impacts have been reported by controlled evaluations testing the effectiveness of focused deterrence programs in reducing gang violence and street crime driven by disorderly drug markets and by non-experimental studies that examine repeat individual offending. It is noteworthy that the size of the effects observed are large, though the committee observed that many of the largest impacts are in studies with evaluation designs that are less rigorous. The committee did not identify any randomized experiments in this program area. Nonetheless, many of the quasi-experiments have study designs that create highly credible equivalence between their treatment and comparison conditions, which supports interpreting their results as evidence of causation.

While SQF has long been a law enforcement tool of policing, the landmark 1968 Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio provided a set of standard criteria that facilitated its use as a strategy for crime control. According to that decision, police may stop a person based upon a “reasonable suspicion” that that person may commit or is in the process of committing a crime; if a separate “reasonable suspicion” that the person is armed exists, the police may conduct a frisk of the stopped individual. While this standard means that Terry stops could not be legally applied without reference to the behavior of the individual being stopped, interpretation of that behavior gave significant leeway to the police. As a proactive policing strategy, departments often employ SQF more expansively and to promote forward-looking, preventive ends.

Non-experimental analyses of SQF broadly applied across a jurisdiction show mixed findings. However, a separate body of controlled evaluation research (including randomized experiments) that examines the effectiveness of SQF and other self-initiated enforcement activities by officers in targeting places with serious gun crime problems and focusing on high-risk repeat offenders consistently reports statistically significant short-term crime reductions.

Community-Based Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-10 Existing studies do not identify a consistent crime-prevention benefit for community-oriented policing programs. However, many of these studies are characterized by weak evaluation designs.

CONCLUSION 4-11 At present, there are an insufficient number of rigorous empirical studies on procedural justice policing to draw a firm conclusion about its effectiveness in reducing crime and disorder.

CONCLUSION 4-12 Broken windows policing interventions that use aggressive tactics for increasing misdemeanor arrests to control disorder generate small to null impacts on crime.

CONCLUSION 4-13 Evaluations of broken windows interventions that use place-based, problem-solving practices to reduce social and physical disorder have reported consistent short-term crime-reduction impacts. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of these kinds of broken windows strategies on crime or on possible jurisdictional outcomes.

The committee also reviewed the crime-prevention impacts of interventions using a community-based crime prevention approach. Such strategies include community-oriented policing, broken windows policing, and procedural justice policing. The logic models informing these community-based strategies seek to enlist and mobilize people who are not police in the processes of policing. In this case, however, the focus is generally not on specific actors such as business or property owners (as in the case of third party policing) but on the community more generally. In some cases, community-based strategies rely on enhancing “collective efficacy,” which is a community’s ability to engage in collective action to do something about crime (e.g., community-oriented policing and broken windows policing). In other cases, community-based models seek to change community members’ evaluations of the legitimacy of police actions (e.g., procedural justice policing) with the goal of increasing cooperation between the police and the public or encouraging law-abiding behavior. These goals are often intertwined in a real-world policing program.

As a proactive crime-prevention strategy, community-oriented policing tries to address and mitigate community problems (crime or otherwise) and, in turn, to build social resilience, collective efficacy, and empowerment to strengthen the infrastructure for the coproduction of safety and crime prevention. Community-oriented policing involves three core processes

and structures: (1) citizen involvement in identifying and addressing public safety concerns; (2) the decentralization of decision making to develop responses to locally defined problems; and (3) problem solving. Problem solving and decentralization acquire a community-oriented policing character when these process elements are embedded in the community engagement (often called “partnership”) element.

Although the committee identified a large number of studies of community-oriented policing programs, many of these programs were implemented in tandem with tactics typical of other approaches, such as problem solving. This was not surprising, given that basic definitions of community policing used by police departments often included problem solving as a key programmatic element. The studies also varied in their outcomes, reflecting the broad range of tactics and practices that are included in community-oriented policing programs, and many of the studies were characterized by weak evaluation designs. With these caveats, the committee did not identify a consistent crime prevention benefit for community-oriented policing programs.

Procedural justice policing seeks to impress upon citizens and the wider community that the police exercise their authority in legitimate ways. When citizens accord legitimacy to police activity, according to this logic model, they are more inclined to defer to police authority in instances of citizen-police interaction and to collaborate with police in the future, even to the extent of being more inclined not to violate the law. There is currently only a very small evidence base from which to support conclusions about the impact of procedural justice policing on crime prevention. Existing research does not support a conclusion that procedural justice policing impacts crime or disorder outcomes. At the same time, because the evidence base is small, the committee also cannot conclude that such strategies are ineffective.

Broken windows policing shares with community-oriented policing a concern for community welfare and envisions a role for police in finding ways to strengthen community structures and processes that provide a degree of immunity from disorder and crime in neighborhoods. Unlike the community-oriented policing strategy, it does not emphasize the coproductive collaborations of police and community as a mode of intervention; rather, it focuses on what police should do to establish conditions that allow “natural” community entities to flourish and promote neighborhood order and social/economic vitality. Implementations of broken windows interventions vary from informal enforcement tactics (warnings, rousting disorderly people) to formal or more intrusive ones (arrests, citations, stop and frisk), all of which are intended either to disrupt the forces of disorder before they overwhelm a neighborhood’s capacity for order maintenance

or to restore afflicted neighborhoods to a level where intrinsic community sources of order can manage it.

The impacts of broken windows policing are mixed across evaluations, again complicating the ability of the committee to draw strong inferences. However, the available program evaluations suggest that aggressive, misdemeanor arrest–based approaches to control disorder generate small to null impacts on crime. In contrast, controlled evaluations of place-based approaches that use problem-solving interventions to reduce social and physical disorder provide evidence of consistent crime-reduction impacts.

COMMUNITY IMPACTS

There is broad recognition that a positive community relationship with the police has value in its own right, irrespective of any influence it may have on crime or disorder. Democratic theories assert that the police, as an arm of government, are to serve the community and should be accountable to it in ways that elicit public approval and consent. Given this premise and the recent conflicts between the police and the public, the committee thought it very important to assess the impacts of proactive policing on issues, such as fear of crime, collective efficacy, and community evaluation of police legitimacy.

Place-Based, Problem-Solving, and Person-Focused Interventions

CONCLUSION 5-1 Existing research suggests that place-based policing strategies rarely have negative short-term impacts on community outcomes. At the same time, such strategies rarely improve community perceptions of the police or other community outcome measures. There is a virtual absence of evidence on the long-term and jurisdiction-level impacts of place-based policing on community outcomes.

CONCLUSION 5-2 Studies show consistent small-to-moderate, positive impacts of problem-solving interventions on short-term community satisfaction with the police. There is little evidence available on the long-term and jurisdiction-level impacts of problem-solving strategies on community outcomes.

CONCLUSION 5-3 There is little consistency found in the impacts of problem-solving policing on perceived disorder, quality of life, fear of crime, and police legitimacy, except for the near-absence of backfire effects. The lack of backfire effects suggests that the risk is low of harmful community effects from tactics typical of problem-solving strategies.

CONCLUSION 5-4 Studies evaluating the impact of person-focused strategies on community outcomes have a number of design limitations that prevent causal inferences to be drawn about program effects. However, the studies of citizens’ personal experiences with person-focused strategies do show marked negative associations between exposure to stop, question, and frisk and proactive traffic enforcement approaches and community outcomes. The long-term and jurisdictionwide community consequences of person-focused proactive strategies remain untested.

Place-based, person-focused, and problem-solving interventions are distinct from community-based proactive strategies in that they do not directly seek to engage the public to enhance legitimacy evaluations and cooperation. In this context, the concerns regarding community outcomes for these approaches have often focused not on whether they improve community attitudes toward the police but rather on whether the focus on crime control leads inevitably to declines in positive community attitudes. Community-based strategies, in contrast, specifically seek to reduce fear, increase trust and willingness to intervene in community problems, and increase trust and confidence in the police.

A body of research evaluating the impact of place-based strategies on community attitudes is only now emerging; this research includes both quasi-experimental and experimental studies. However, the consistency of the findings suggests that place-based proactive policing strategies rarely have negative short-term impacts on community attitudes. At the same time, the evidence suggests that such strategies rarely improve community perceptions of the police or other community outcome measures. Moreover, existing studies have generally examined the broader community and not specific individuals who are the focus of place-based interventions at crime hot spots. As noted below, more aggressive policing tactics that are focused on individuals may have negative outcomes on those who have contact with the police. Existing studies also generally measure short-term changes, which may not be sensitive to communities that become the focus of long-term implementation of place-based policing. Finally, there has not been measurement of the impacts of place-based approaches on the broader community, extending beyond the specific focus of interventions.

The research literature on community impacts of problem-solving interventions is larger. Although much of the literature relies on quasi-experimental designs, a few well-implemented randomized experiments also provide information on community outcomes. Studies show consistent positive short-term impacts of problem-solving strategies on community satisfaction with the police. At the same time, however, the research base lacks estimates of larger jurisdictional impacts of these strategies.

Because problem-solving strategies are so often implemented in tandem with tactics typical of community-based policing (i.e., community engagement), it is difficult to determine what role the problem-solving aspect plays in community outcomes, compared to the impact of the community engagement element. Although this fact makes it difficult to draw strong conclusions about “what” is impacting community attitudes, as we note below, it may be that implementing multiple approaches in tandem can also have more positive outcomes for police agencies.

While there is evidence that problem-solving approaches increase community satisfaction with the police, we found little consistency in problem-solving policing’s impacts on perceived disorder/quality of life, fear of crime, and police legitimacy. However, the near-absence of backfire (i.e., undesired negative) effects in the evaluations of problem-solving strategies suggests that the risk of harmful community effects from problem-solving strategies is low. As with place-based approaches, community outcomes generally do not examine people who have direct contact with the police, and measurement of impacts is local as opposed to jurisdictional.

The body of research evaluating the impact of person-focused strategies on community outcomes is relatively small, even in comparison with the evidence base on problem-solving and place-based strategies; the long-term community consequences of person-focused proactive strategies also remain untested. These studies involve qualitative or correlational designs that make it difficult to draw causal inferences about typical impacts of these strategies. Correlational studies do find strong negative associations between exposure to the strategy and the attitudes and orientations of individuals who are the subjects of aggressive law enforcement interventions (SQF and proactive traffic enforcement). Moreover, a number of ethnographic and survey-based studies have found negative outcomes, especially for Black and other non-White youth who are continually exposed to SQFs. The studies that measure the impact on the larger community show a more complicated and unclear pattern of outcomes.

Community-Based Interventions

CONCLUSION 6-1 Community-oriented policing leads to modest improvements in the public’s view of policing and the police in the short term. (Very few studies of community-oriented policing have traced its long-term effects on community outcomes or its jurisdictionwide consequences.) These improvements occur with greatest consistency for measures of community satisfaction and less so for measures of perceived disorder, fear of crime, and police legitimacy. Evaluations of community-oriented policing rarely find “backfire” effects on community attitudes. Hence, the deployment of community-oriented policing

as a proactive strategy seems to offer prospects for modest gains at little risk of negative consequences.

CONCLUSION 6-2 Due to the small number of studies, mixed findings, and methodological limitations, no conclusion can be drawn about the impact of community-oriented policing on collective efficacy and citizen cooperative behavior.

CONCLUSION 6-3 The committee is not able to draw a conclusion regarding the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime or collective efficacy. This is due in part to the surprisingly small number of studies that examine the community outcomes of broken windows policing and in part to the mixed effects observed.

CONCLUSION 6-4 In general, studies show that perceptions of procedurally just treatment are strongly and positively associated with subjective evaluations of police legitimacy and cooperation with the police. However, the research base is currently insufficient to draw conclusions about whether procedurally just policing causally influences either perceived legitimacy or cooperation.

CONCLUSION 6-5 Although the application of procedural justice concepts to policing is relatively new, there are more extensive literatures on procedural justice in social psychology, in management, and with other legal authorities such as the courts. Those studies are often designed in ways that make causal inferences more compelling, and results in those areas suggest that the application of procedural justice concepts to policing has promise and that further studies are needed to examine the degree to which the success of such strategies in those other domains can be replicated in the domain of policing.

The available empirical research on community-oriented policing’s community effects focuses on citizen perceptions of police performance (in terms of what they do and the consequences for community disorder), satisfaction with police, and perceived police legitimacy. The evidence suggests that community-oriented policing leads to modest improvements in the community’s view of policing and the police in the short term. This occurs with greatest consistency for measures of community satisfaction and less so for measures of perceived disorder, fear of crime, and perceived legitimacy. Evaluations of community-oriented policing rarely find “backfire” effects from the intervention on community attitudes. Therefore, the deployment of community-oriented policing as a proactive strategy seems to offer prospects of modest gains at little risk of negative consequences.

Broken windows policing is often evaluated directly in terms of its short-term crime control impacts. We have emphasized in this report that the logic model for broken windows policing seeks to alter the community’s levels of fear and collective efficacy as a method of enhancing community social controls and reducing crime in the long run. While this is a key element of the broken windows policing model, the committee’s review of the evidence found that these outcomes have seldom been examined. The evidence was insufficient to draw any conclusions regarding the impact of broken windows policing on community social controls. Studies of the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime do not support the model’s claim that such programs will reduce levels of fear in the community, at least in the short run.

While there is a rapidly growing body of research on the community impacts of procedural justice policing, it is difficult to draw causal inferences from these studies. In general, the studies show that perceptions of procedurally just treatment are strongly correlated with subjective evaluations of police legitimacy. The extant research base on the impacts of procedural justice proactive policing strategies on perceived legitimacy and cooperation was insufficient for the committee to draw conclusions about whether procedurally just policing will improve community evaluations of police legitimacy or increase cooperation with the police.

Although this committee finding may appear at odds with a growing movement to encourage procedurally just behavior among the police, the committee thinks it is important to stress that a finding that there is insufficient evidence to support the expected outcomes of procedural justice policing is not the same as a finding that such outcomes do not exist. Moreover, although the application of procedural justice to policing is relatively new, there is a more extensive evidence base on procedural justice in social psychology and organizational management, as well as on procedural justice with other legal authorities such as the courts. Those studies are often designed in ways that make causal inferences more compelling, and results in those areas suggest meaningful impacts of procedural justice on the legitimacy of institutions and authorities involved. Thus, the application of procedural justice ideas to policing has promise, although further studies are needed to examine the degree to which the success of such implementations in other social contexts can be replicated in the arena of policing.

RACIAL BIAS AND DISPARITIES

CONCLUSION 7-1 There are likely to be large racial disparities in the volume and nature of police–citizen encounters when police target high-risk people or high-risk places, as is common in many proactive policing programs.

CONCLUSION 7-2 Existing evidence does not establish conclusively whether, and to what extent, the racial disparities associated with concentrated person-focused and place-based enforcement are indicators of statistical prediction, racial animus, implicit bias, or other causes. However, the history of racial injustice in the United States, in particular in the area of criminal justice and policing, as well as ethnographic research that has identified disparate impacts of policing on non-White communities, makes the investigation of the causes of racial disparities a key research and policy concern.

Concerns about racial bias loom especially large in discussions of policing. The interest of this report was to assess whether and to what extent proactive policing affects racial disparities in police–citizen encounters and racial bias in police behavior. Recent high-profile incidents of police shootings and abusive police–citizen interaction caught on camera have raised questions regarding basic fairness, racial discrimination, and the excessive use of force of all forms against non-Whites, and especially Blacks, in the United States. In considering these incidents, the committee stresses that the origins of policing in the United States are intimately interwoven with the nation’s history of racial prejudice. Although in recent decades police have often made a strong effort to address racially biased behaviors, wide disparities remain in the extent to which non-White people and White people are stopped or arrested by police. Moreover, as our discussion of constitutional violations in Chapter 3 notes, the U.S. Department of Justice has identified continued racial disparities and biased behavior in policing in a number of major American police agencies.

As social norms have evolved to make overt expressions of bigotry less acceptable, psychologists have developed tools to measure more subtle factors underlying biased behavior. A series of studies suggest that negative racial attitudes may influence police behavior—although there is no direct research on proactive policing. There is a further growing body of research identifying how these psychological mechanisms may affect behavior and what types of situations, policies, or practices may exacerbate or ameliorate racially biased behaviors. In a number of studies, social psychologists have found that race may affect decision making, especially under situations where time is short and such decisions need to be made quickly. More broadly, social psychologists have identified dispositional (i.e., individual characteristics) and situational and environmental factors that are associated with higher levels of racially biased behavior.

Proactive strategies often facilitate increased officer contact with residents (particularly in high-crime areas), involve contacts that are often enforcement-oriented and uninvited, and may allow greater officer discretion compared to standard policing models. These elements align with

broad categories of possible risk factors for biased behavior by police officers. For example, when contacts involve stops or arrests, police may be put in situations where they have to “think fast” and react quickly. Social psychologists have argued that such situations may be particularly prone to the emergence of what they define as implicit biases.

Relative to the research on the impact of proactive policing policies on crime, there is very little field research exploring the potential role that racially biased behavior plays in proactive policing. There is even less research on the ways that race may shape police policy or color the consequences of police encounters with residents. These research gaps leave police departments and communities concerned with bias in police behavior without an evidence base from which to make informed decisions. Because of these gaps, the committee was unable to draw any concrete conclusions about the role of biased behavior in proactive policing. Consequently, research on these topics is urgently needed both so that the field may better understand potential negative consequences of proactive policing and so that communities and police departments may be better equipped to align police behaviors with values of equity and justice.

Inferring the role of racial animus, statistical prediction, or other dispositional and situational risk factors in contributing to observed racial disparities is a challenging question for research. Although focused policing approaches may reduce overall levels of police intrusion, we also detailed in Chapter 7 the very large disparities in the stops and arrests of non-White, and especially Black Americans, and we noted that concentrating enforcement efforts in high-crime areas and on highly active individual offenders may lead to racial disparities in police–citizen interactions. Although these disparities are often much reduced when taking into account population benchmarks such as official criminality, the committee also noted that studies that seek to benchmark citizen–police interactions against simple population counts or broad, publicly available measures of criminal activity do not yield conclusive information regarding the potential for racially biased behavior in proactive policing efforts. Identifying an appropriate benchmark would require detailed information on the geography and nature of the proactive strategy, as well as localized knowledge of the relative importance of the problem. Such benchmarks are not currently available. The absence of such benchmarks makes it difficult to distinguish between accurate statistical prediction and racial profiling.

Some of the most illuminating evidence on the potential impact of proactive policing and increased citizen–police contacts on racial outcomes relates to the use of SQF in New York City. This research seeks to model the probabilities that police suspicion of criminal possession of a weapon turns out to be justified, given the information available to officers when deciding whether to stop someone. This work finds substantial racial and

ethnic disparities in the distribution of these probabilities, suggesting that police in New York City apply lower thresholds of suspicion to blacks and Hispanics. We do not know whether this pattern exists in other settings.

Per the charge to the committee, this report reviewed a relatively narrow area of intersection between race and policing. This focus, though, is nested in a broader societal framework of possible disparities and biased behaviors across a whole array of social contexts. These can affect proactive policing in, for example, the distribution of crime in society and the extent of exposure of specific groups to police surveillance and enforcement. However, it was beyond the scope of this study to review them systematically in the context of the committee’s work.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

In its review of the evidence, the committee tried to identify the most credible evidence on whether particular types of proactive policing strategies have been shown to affect legality, crime, communities, racial disparities, and racially biased behavior. A strategy is said to have “impact” if it affects outcomes compared with what they would have been at that same time and place in the absence of the implementation of a specific strategy. The strongest evidence often derives from randomized field trials and natural experiments in the field, typically implemented through a change in the activities of a police department structured so as to create a credibly comparable control condition with which to compare the “treatment” condition. However, as we have emphasized throughout the report, other methodological approaches can also provide rigorous evidence for the types of outcomes that we have examined. In turn, ethnographic studies have provided important information for the committee in understanding the processes that lead to such outcomes. Nonetheless, the emphasis in many sections of our report is on the “internal validity” of the evaluation: how strong is the evidence that a particular treatment implemented in a particular place caused the observed impact? And this assessment of validity has important implications for the strength of policy recommendations that we can draw from our review.

We want to emphasize that even a well-designed experimental trial implemented with fidelity may yield biased effect estimates if the outcomes data are not reliable. Most of the studies of crime outcomes examined in this report used crime data collected by the police department that is responsible for implementing the program. With the exception of homicide and perhaps motor-vehicle theft, the police only know of a fraction of all serious crimes. Less than one-half of robberies, aggravated assaults, and burglaries are reported to the police, and of course, reporting is a precondition for inclusion in the departmental statistics. That fact does not

negate the usefulness of these data in measuring impact, but it does compel consideration of whether the intervention is likely to affect the likelihood that a crime will be reported to and recorded by the police. For example, if a community-based policing intervention has the effects of both reducing crime and increasing the percentage of crimes reported to the police, the result might be that the latter will mask the former and obscure the crime-reduction effect. We note this possibility as a potential challenge to the internal validity of even well-designed and faithfully implemented experimental interventions, if they rely solely on police data.

Data that are collected by researchers may also have serious weaknesses. In some of the community surveys reviewed in this report, response rates were exceptionally low. A number of studies that we examined also used laboratory data; the laboratory environment allows a great deal of control over the research process but can be criticized as artificial and as a poor indicator of what actually happens in the field in policing.

More generally, we want to point to three specific limitations when it comes to the usefulness of this review in informing policy choice. First, the literature that we reviewed typically lacks much information on the magnitudes of the effects of the strategies evaluated. A clear demonstration that the “treatment effect” is greater than would be expected by chance—that is, that the estimated effect is statistically significantly different from zero—helps establish that the program “worked” but not that it was “worthwhile” from a policy perspective. A more complete evaluation would require a comparison of the estimated magnitude of the effect with an estimate of the costs of the program. How many serious crimes were prevented by the candidate program for every $100,000 worth of resources devoted to it, and what are the effects of removing that $100,000 from what it would otherwise have been used for? For a police chief or city mayor, resources are limited and must be accounted for in making well-informed choices about policing practice. This problem becomes even more difficult when one is trying to calculate costs and benefits for such outcomes as community satisfaction or perceived legitimacy. The literature rarely provides such a cost-effectiveness analysis, and hence this committee cannot provide policy proscriptions that would give specific advice about the costs or cost savings.

Second, and closely related, is that the evaluation evidence, because it typically does not account for cost, may actually provide a misleading impression of whether a program “worked”—whether in reducing crime or improving community attitudes for the entire jurisdiction—as opposed to having an effect only for the segment of the city represented by the treatment group. As we have noted throughout the report, most evaluations provide a local estimate of program impacts. They do not report how the program affected the jurisdiction overall. Absent such reports, or at least

evidence-grounded estimates of jurisdiction-level impact, it is very difficult to provide guidance to police executives about how redeployment of resources will impact overall trends across a city. Since most of the evaluations we reviewed assess local impacts only, we often do not know what the impacts of a program will be on the broader community when a program is broadly applied, as opposed to when it is implemented on a small scale.

Third, a police chief who is considering adopting a particular innovation may be able to make a prediction about whether it will reduce crime or improve community attitudes, based on evaluations of one or more similar programs, but that prediction must always be hedged by the constraint that making inferences about “here and now” based on “there and then” is a tricky business. A well-known example comes from the “coerced abstinence” program for drug-involved convicts known as HOPE. The program originated and was carefully evaluated in courts in Honolulu, Hawaii, where it appeared very effective. It has been replicated a number of times on the mainland United States, with at best mixed results. The variability in results may reflect differences in the quality of implementation by the law enforcement agencies, the modal type of drug of abuse (which differs among jurisdictions), or other factors. 1 To the extent that programmatic effects are moderated by the characteristics of the target population and the implementing agency, then importing a program that appears promising into another setting can lead to disappointment. The uncertainties created by this “external validity” problem for evaluating field trials cannot be readily quantified. A common-sense view is that a single evaluation is not enough to establish a strong case for adoption in a different time and place and that understanding potential modifiers of the effects is important for evidence-based policy.

However, while acknowledging these caveats, the committee thinks that we can provide broad policy guidance regarding what the science of policing is today and how that might affect the choices that police executives make. Waiting until the evidence base is fully developed to draw from science in policy making is not only unrealistic—it also means that practitioners will not benefit from what is known already. Our report provides important knowledge for policing, knowledge that can help inform the debate about what the police should be doing. Nonetheless, as we have noted, there are important limitations in how existing knowledge can be used, and those limitations should be considered when drawing upon the science in this report.

A number of identifiable policing strategies provide evidence of consistent short-term crime-prevention benefits at the local level. These in-

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1 For a discussion of HOPE, see the special issue of Criminology & Public Policy (November 2016), Volume 15, Issue 4.

clude hot spots policing, problem-oriented policing, third party policing, SQF targeted to violent and gun-crime hot spots, focused deterrence, and problem-solving efforts incorporated in broken windows policing. What these approaches have in common is their effort to more tightly specify and focus police activities. Police executives who implement such strategies are drawing upon evidence-based approaches. At the same time, the ability to generalize from existing evaluations to the broader array of at least larger American cities is sometimes limited by the limited number and scope of studies that are available, though in the case of hot spots policing a larger number of studies across diverse contexts have been carried out. We also find that these strategies, with the important exception of SQF, do not lead to negative community outcomes. With the caveats noted above, it appears that crime-prevention outcomes can be obtained without this type of unintended negative consequence. Albeit preliminary, this finding reinforces the policy relevance of these evidence-based approaches.

At the same time, the results of our review suggest that police executives should not view certain proactive policing approaches as evidence based, at least at this time. For instance, SQF indiscriminately focused across a jurisdiction or broken windows policing programs relying on a generalized approach to misdemeanor arrests (“zero tolerance”) have not shown evidence of effectiveness. This caveat, combined with research evidence that documents negative individual outcomes for people who are the subject of aggressive police enforcement efforts, even in the absence of clear causal interpretation, should lead police executives to exercise caution in adopting generalized, aggressive enforcement tactics. Moreover, our review of the constitutional basis for focusing police resources on people or places suggests that issues of legality are particularly relevant in the case of such strategies. Even in the case of focused programs for which there is evidence of crime-control success, when aggressive approaches such as SQF are employed, police executives must consider and actively try to prevent potential negative outcomes on the community and on legality, and they should cooperate with researchers attempting to quantify and evaluate these issues. This means not only that police executives should proceed with caution in adopting such strategies but also that agencies that are already applying them broadly and without careful focus should consider scaling down present efforts.

The committee’s findings regarding community-based strategies raise important questions about whether such approaches will yield crime-prevention benefits. Many scholars and policy makers have sought to argue that community-oriented policing and procedural justice policing will yield not only better relations with the public but also greater crime control. We do not find consistent evidence for this proposition, and police executives

should be accordingly wary of implementing community-based strategies primarily as a crime-control approach.

The committee also concluded that community-oriented policing programs were likely to improve evaluations of the police, albeit modestly. Accordingly, if the policy goal of an agency is to improve its relationship with the communities it serves, then community-oriented policing is a promising strategy choice, although we are unable to offer a judgment on whether the benefits are sufficient to justify the expected costs. Our review of policing programs with a community-based approach also suggests that police executives may want to consider applying multiple strategies as a more general agency approach. The difficulty of distinguishing the effects of community-based and problem-solving approaches that are often implemented together has been noted numerous times in this report. However, we also think that better outcomes may be obtained when programs are hybridized across the approaches defined in this report. If, for example, an agency seeks to improve both crime prevention and community satisfaction with the police, it seems reasonable to combine practices typical of community-oriented policing with evidence-based crime-prevention practices typical of strategies such as hot spots policing or problem-oriented policing. This has already been done in problem-solving approaches that emphasize community engagement, where these dual benefits have been observed.

Existing studies do not provide evidence of crime prevention effectiveness in the case of proactive procedural justice policing. Accordingly, the committee believes that caution should be used in advocating for such approaches on the ground that they will reduce crime. At the same time, studies reviewed by the committee did not find that procedural justice policing has the expected positive community outcomes. Does this mean that police should not encourage procedural justice policing programs? We think that this would be a serious mistake for two reasons. The first is simply that procedural justice reflects the behavior of police that is appropriate in a democratic society. Procedural justice encourages democratic policing even if it may not change citizen attitudes. The second reason relates to the state of research in this area. While it is a mistake to draw strong conclusions that procedural justice policing will improve community members’ evaluations of police legitimacy or cooperation with the police, it is equally wrong to draw the conclusion that it will not do so. Again, the evidence base here is too sparse to support either position.

RESEARCH GAPS

While there is a large body of evaluation research in policing today, as contrasted with two or three decades ago, the committee identified a

number of key gaps in what is known about proactive policing. Filling such gaps in the evidence base is critical for developing the type of knowledge that, as we noted earlier, is necessary to inform policy decisions for policing. Policing in the United States represents a large commitment of public resources; it is estimated to cost federal, state, and local governments more than $125 billion per year ( Kyckelhahn, 2015 ). Given that investment, the extent of the research gaps on proactive policing is surprising. For the police to take advantage of the revolution in police practices that proactive policing represents, they will need the help of the federal government and private foundations in answering a host of questions regarding effectiveness, community outcomes, legality, and racially biased behavior. The committee also noted an imbalance in the evidence base across the areas of the committee’s charge. While far from complete, there is a large body of credible causal evidence on the impact of proactive policing on crime rates. However, social science research of a similar form on other equally important outcomes of policing is only beginning to occur.

We think it also important to note at the outset that more research needs to be focused on the standard model of policing. The 2004 National Research Council report, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence , argued that there was little evidence supporting such standard police practices as random police patrol across large areas, follow-up investigations, and rapid response to citizen calls for service. However, a number of new studies have been carried out since the 2004 study, and this recent research suggests that the view of the standard model of policing in that report may need to be reassessed (see, e.g., Chaflin and McCrary, 2017 ; Evans and Owens, 2007 ; Cook, 2015 ). In order to estimate the benefits of proactive policing efforts, more information is needed on whether standard policing practices are generating crime-prevention benefits, as well as sustaining and perhaps improving the community’s trust in and regard for the police.

Improving the Quality of Data and Research on Proactive Policing

Drawing conclusions about the efficacy of proactive policing strategies or about policing innovations more broadly is complicated by the absence of comprehensive data on police behavior in the field. Just because a policy has been formally adopted does not mean that officers on the beat behave according to the tenets of that policy. The impact of the adoption of a policy on any outcome is, essentially, a combination of the actual impact of a police agency adopting, for example, a place-based intervention, and the probability that officers actually implement this intervention as they engage in targeted patrol in particular places. Identifying ways to measure what police officers actually do is, therefore, a central problem for evaluat-

ing the impact of proactive policing strategies on crime, communities, and the legality of officer behavior.

To be useful for evaluating the impact of a proactive policing strategy on what officers do in the field, it is necessary for the data to, at minimum, measure officer behavior both before and after the policy change. Ideally, the data would span multiple agencies, thereby allowing for a more credible analysis of what officers might have done in the absence of the policy change. There have been some examples of efforts by governments to proactively develop such data sources. Such efforts include the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Use-of-Force Data Collection project, the Police Data Initiative in the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) in the U.S. Department of Justice, and the proactive efforts in California to require local agencies to report information on all stops to that state’s Office of the Attorney General (CA AB 953). 2 Similarly, there are a number of academic and nonprofit efforts to augment police data collection efforts and thereby provide enhanced analytic capacity, such as the Center for Policing Equity’s National Justice Database and the Stanford Open Policing Project. 3 Substantially more effort needs to be devoted to collecting reliable data on how proactive policing is carried out in the field. 4 Without the routine collection of such data, it is not possible to assess the prevalence and incidence of proactive policing or to characterize the content of such strategies.

The committee also noted more general weaknesses in existing studies that limit the conclusions that can be drawn. One important limitation is that proactive policing interventions often overlap in terms of the strategies represented by the elements of the intervention. For example, many place-based policing interventions include elements of a problem-solving approach, as do many community-based programs. While we recognize that the police and program developers are focused on crime prevention and not on identifying the specific components of a program that have impact, the mixing of elements from different approaches makes it extremely difficult to draw strong conclusions about which element(s) in a program had a crime-prevention impact. Therefore, it is very important in future research to develop study designs that allow identification of the specific mechanisms that produce impacts.

2 See https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB953 [November 2016].

3 See http://mashable.com/2017/02/23/google-racial-justice-commitment/#8KbrqmHvKkqjhttp://observer.com/2016/02/traffic-stops-database/ [November 2016].

4 Interesting new opportunities for such data collection have been taken advantage of by researchers. For example, S. Weisburd (2016) used GPS data on exactly where police cars are in Dallas, Texas, at small intervals of time to draw inferences about the effectiveness of police patrol in small areas.

More generally, it is important for evaluations to focus on the underlying logic models that are proposed to account for (or promise) program impacts. Broken windows policing, for example, was conceived as a method for increasing community social controls in the long run. However, very few studies of broken windows policing actually examine how police activities in reducing disorder will impact such long-term attitudes. This is true for many of the proactive policing strategies examined in this report. Research funding agencies should require the incorporation of tests of the validity of underlying logic models in their study solicitations.

The focus on short-run, rather than long-run, impacts also pervades the evaluation of crime incidence, which is the most researched outcome the committee examined. Seldom do researchers look at program impacts extending for more than a year after program initiation, and only a handful of the studies identified by the committee look at crime prevention in the long run. While research indicates that many proactive practices seem to create a crime-reduction effect in the short term, the long-term impacts of these programs also should be an important focus of study. And whereas most of the available research that measures community effects does so over a relatively short term (a year or less), it is likely that community effects—especially those involving people who have little or no direct contact with the police—require much longer to register. Some research suggests that community effects are dynamic, but that research has generally not examined effects over several years. For all these reasons, more research is needed that tracks the effects of proactive policing over several years.

With regard to the types of research conducted, more implementation and process evaluations are needed to better understand the challenges of getting programs and policies translated into police practice, as well as to better understand the actual practices that are being evaluated in terms of community outcomes. The standardization of measures of implementation and dosage for specific strategies will improve the capacity of systematic reviews of these studies to interpret an array of findings. In turn, in many areas there is a need for more rigorous evaluation designs—and especially the development of well-implemented randomized trials.

In looking at the studies reviewed in this report, the committee notes that most are concentrated in large, urban jurisdictions. Smaller, suburban, and rural jurisdictions are understudied, but they should be included in the mix of funded evaluations. Community dynamics in such jurisdictions may vary in ways not revealed in the studies of larger communities. Evaluations should also control for the larger organizational context in which policing programs operate. Little is known about how the structure of a department and, for example, its management style affects its ability to develop and sustain proactive policing programs that reduce crime while enhancing the legitimacy and legality of police officers’ actions. Further research is also

needed on how these outcomes are affected by police oversight and accountability mechanisms, including review boards, lawsuits, data disclosure requirements, and the standardized collection of data on officer activities (as recommended above).

Finally, the committee notes the absence of rigorous research on training of police. Training has been shown to change behavior in other settings, particularly management. Police training programs for proactive policing are recent, and there is very little evidence at this time about their long-term effects. Several recent studies suggest that training programs can influence officers’ attitudes toward, and behavior within, communities. Studies need to examine the impact of training on police officers’ orientations and behaviors. Expanding the Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies, and in particular identifying which agencies hire graduates, as opposed to simply how many agencies, is a possible first step that would facilitate linking officer training to actual field outcomes. It is especially important for future research to evaluate which training approaches and methods prove most effective for imparting the necessary will and skill required to implement a given proactive strategy well.

Proactive Policing and the Law

There is less research on how proactive policies influence the legality of officer behavior than on how those policies affect crime or community perceptions of crime. One of the hurdles is the absence of a clear measure of what, exactly, constitutes legal behavior on an officer’s part. Research on how to quantify the legality of police officer behavior in a way that is consistent with the law and lends itself to causal analysis is a necessary first step. Because of the complex issues involved, such research is likely to be most productive if conducted by members of the legal, social science, and police leadership communities in collaboration.

Researchers studying the impacts of proactive policies on citizen lawbreaking, using experimental or quasi-experimental designs and administrative data, also should identify the relevant legal standards for officer behavior and include measures of officer behavior that are affected by these standards as one of their assessed outcomes. Ethnographic, qualitative, and mixed methods social science research, as well as legal scholarship, should inform how quantitative researchers conceptualize these measures. Given that officer law-breaking is as important, if not more so, in a general evaluation of such policies as undesirable behavior on the part of citizens, researchers who have access to administrative data that measure and make reliable legal judgments about officer behavior, including data collected by body-worn cameras, should include assessment of such outcomes in their analysis of the policies’ impacts on crime by citizens.

Crime-Control Impacts of Proactive Policing

As noted above, while the committee has provided a series of conclusions regarding the crime- and disorder-control impacts of proactive policing, there are significant caveats that limited our ability to develop specific policy prescriptions. Given the importance of the policing enterprise and its impacts on U.S. society, we think that a major investment in research on proactive policing is warranted, with a complementary investment in assessing standard policing practices.

A better understanding is needed of the crime-prevention effects of proactive policing programs relative to each other and relative to such activities as crime investigation, response to 911 calls, and routine patrol. For example, which types of proactive activities create a greater deterrent effect in a crime hot spot: foot patrol, technological surveillance (such as CCTVs), problem-solving projects, enforcement activities, or situational crime-prevention strategies? Can gun crimes be best reduced through focused deterrence/pulling levers, pedestrian and traffic stops, or crime prevention through environmental design?

Equally important to the relative deterrent effect of proactive policing approaches are the social costs and collateral consequences of those approaches. At the most basic level, identifying other effects than crime reduction of proactive policing approaches—positive or negative—is needed. Once identified, measuring for these effects when testing for the crime prevention effects of proactive policing should be included in study designs.

A key issue in place-based studies is whether crime displaces to other areas. There is now a strong literature showing that immediate geographic displacement is not common, and studies instead point to a diffusion of crime control benefits to areas near targeted hot spots. However, little is known about displacement to more distal areas and whether such displacement affects the crime prevention benefits of place-based strategies. Study of distal displacement needs to be a central feature of the next generation of research on place-based policing. Most evaluations also provide only local estimates of impacts, and it is critical to examine whether place-based strategies implemented across cities will have jurisdictional impacts. Estimating the size of jurisdictional impacts for strategies such as hot spots policing is critical for police executives and policy makers as they consider the wider benefits of these approaches.

More research is also needed on how technology contributes to the crime prevention effects of proactive policing strategies. There has been relatively little research on the impacts of technology in policing beyond technical, efficiency, or process evaluations. More studies of the crime-control impacts of license plate readers, body-worn cameras, gun-shot detection technologies, forensic technologies, and CCTV are needed. Furthermore,

the effectiveness of analytic technologies such as crime analysis and predictive policing software applications also remains under-researched. Given their increased use in proactive policing strategies, much more needs to be known.

To date, there are no rigorous outcome evaluations of law enforcement proactive interventions designed to reduce and prevent technology-related crime, such as cybercrime, fraud and theft using the Internet, or hacking. Proactive activities by federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security remain completely immune from public-domain evaluation in this and all other aspects of their proactive efforts.

Finally, it is important to determine whether community-oriented or procedural justice approaches can produce crime prevention effects. While improving citizen reaction to police activity is an important goal in and of itself, equally important—and connected to this goal—is the detection, prevention, reduction, and control of crime. Perhaps community-oriented or procedural justice approaches can be combined with other effective practices from the place-based, person-focused, or problem-solving approaches to attain both goals. But to date, the effectiveness of community-oriented and procedural justice interventions in crime control is uncertain.

Community Impacts of Proactive Policing

While there is broad recognition of the importance of community impacts of proactive policing strategies, there are only a few studies available on the community impacts of place-based and person-focused strategies, and the results for most types of outcomes are varied. A more extensive menu of observational, quasi-experimental, and experimental evaluations is needed. Systematic assessment of the contingent nature of outcomes is needed. Moreover, although a variety of logic models propose to account for the role that various community outcomes play in the process of affecting crime and disorder levels and community perceptions and behaviors, these logic models have not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests.

A gap noted throughout the research on community impacts is the lack of studies of the long-term effects of proactive strategies. Regardless of the rigor of the evaluation design in terms of inferring causal linkages between strategies and community outcomes, the extant literature provides only an ahistorical, incomplete, and potentially misleading perspective on what the consequences of proactive strategies will be. Future research should take into account both the long-term exposure of research subjects to proactive policing and the need to track the community consequences of those strategies over years, not months. Both variation in the accumulation of dosage over extended time and the consequences of this extended exposure are

virtually unexplored. Whether and how much a pattern of consequences is sustained or decays is also important to know.

One approach to changing community perception of police legitimacy is to change police behavior during contacts with the public. There is considerable evidence in the social psychology literature suggesting that personal contacts can change attitudes. However, there is insufficient research on the likelihood that one personal contact with a police officer can change orientations that have built up over a lifetime, irrespective of how the police behave during that single contact. Studies of the impact of a single experience with the police on a person’s general orientation toward the police are relatively few, and the results are mixed. Research is needed that tests the ability of a single interaction to shape general views about police legitimacy. This work needs to consider different types of encounters. It also needs to take account of characteristics of the person being stopped (race, age, gender, trust in the police) and that person’s history of encounters with the police. Finally, there needs to be a broader consideration of impacts on communities and the inevitable interactions between what the police do in a community and how that activity affects the development trajectory of that community, not only with respect to crime but also for housing, economic development, and other social outcomes.

Racial Bias and Disparities in Proactive Policing

The committee believes that the area of racial disparity and racially biased behavior is a particularly important one for enhancing the rigor and quantity of research on proactive policing. The committee identified five areas where research is most urgently needed with regard to racially biased behavior and proactive policing: (1) psychological risk factors, (2) training on bias reduction, (3) attention to behavioral bias as an important outcome of research on crime reduction, (4) an emphasis on assessing “downstream” consequences of proactive policing on racial outcomes, and (5) an emphasis on “upstream” influences regarding how proactive policing approaches are adopted.

First, a focus is needed on the psychological mechanisms of racially biased police behavior in actual field contexts, not only in laboratory simulations. As we reviewed in Chapter 7 , research in social psychology has identified a number of risk and protective factors that in laboratory settings are associated with either an increase or decrease in racially biased behaviors, even in subjects who do not appear to harbor racial animus. Many situations common in proactive policing map onto these factors. In spite of the potential relevance of the laboratory findings, there is virtually no evidence about whether or not police contexts or trainings produce sufficient protections against those risks in the field. A systematic approach to

these risk factors in proactive policing would be an important step toward producing an evidence base for evaluating racial disparities in proactive policing.

Second, rigorous research is needed on whether police training in this area affects actual police behavior. Even though there have been large investments in police training to address racial bias and disparate treatment, there are at present no rigorous studies that inform these efforts.

Third, the incidence of racially biased behavior and of racial disparities in outcomes should become an important outcome metric for research on proactive policing. To date, outcome evaluations in policing have focused primarily on crime control and at times on community satisfaction or perceived legitimacy. Seldom have studies assessed racial outcomes of proactive policing, despite the fact that these outcomes constitute a key issue for policy in American society. Assessing disparate impacts in policing in an informative way will require spatially detailed demographic information about the population at risk of encountering the police when the policy is in place, in order to identify an appropriate benchmark and identify the marginal person affected by the policy. Until standardized metrics for measuring racially biased behavior are available, along with measures of the populations exposed to proactive policing policies, thorough assessments of proactive policing efforts will likely require formal empirical analysis, as well as qualitative and ethnographic analysis, of proactive strategies, their implementation, and their impacts.

Fourth, understanding the downstream consequences of racial disparities is an urgent research need. Does proactive policing have a long-term impact on racial disparities or race relations in communities? What are the costs of such impacts, and can and should they be compared to the crime-control benefits of proactive policing? As we argued in Chapter 7 , proactive policing may lead to long-term decreases in inequalities in communities because of the benefits of lowered crime and related social consequences of crime. But little is known about such issues to date. To weigh these potential costs of proactive policing against the crime-reducing benefits, researchers must develop some metric for quantifying and estimating the cost of racial disparities, racially biased behavior, and racial animus. Survey techniques commonly used for cost-benefit research in environmental economics may be a useful guide.

Finally, the committee identified very little research on what drives law enforcement agencies to adopt proactive police policies. The history of criminal justice and law enforcement in the United States, along with ethnographic evidence on how police actions are perceived in communities, suggests that the role of race and ethnicity in the adoption of policing practices should be carefully assessed. However, scholars of proactive policing have yet to study carefully how race may influence the adoption of specific

proactive policing policies. It is critically important to understand not only the impacts of proactive policing on racial outcomes but also how race may affect the adoption of specific types of proactive policing. This was a concern raised to us by representatives of such groups as The Movement for Black Lives and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (see Chapter 7 and Appendix A ). Are more aggressive proactive policing strategies more likely to be chosen when Black or disadvantaged communities are the focus of police enforcement? This question needs to be addressed systematically in future research.

THE FUTURE OF PROACTIVE POLICING

Proactive policing has become a key part of police efforts to do something about crime in the United States. This report supports the general conclusion that there is sufficient scientific evidence to support the adoption of some proactive policing practices. Proactive policing efforts that focus on high concentrations of crimes at places or among the high-rate subset of offenders, as well as practices that seek to solve specific crime-fostering problems, show consistent evidence of effectiveness without evidence of negative community outcomes. Community-based strategies have also begun to show evidence of improving the relations between the police and public. At the same time, there are significant gaps in the knowledge base that do not allow one to identify with reasonable confidence the long-term effects of proactive policing. For example, existing research provides little guidance as to whether police programs to enhance procedural justice will improve community perceptions of police legitimacy or community cooperation with the police.

Much has been learned over the past two decades about proactive policing programs. But now that scientific support for these approaches has accumulated, it is time for greater investment in understanding what is cost-effective, how such strategies can be maximized to improve the relationships between the police and the public, and how they can be applied in ways that do not lead to violations of the law by the police.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred.

Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing.

Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.

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7.10 Conclusion

As this chapter shows, there are many different types of crimes against people (and this chapter only covered a few). Each type of crime has different levels or degrees of how bad they are considered to be under the law, which determines the punishment that will be assigned if that person is convicted. Mens rea and actus reus  are major factors in each of these decisions and honestly determining each of those can be more difficult than it may first appear. Further, the manner in which prosecutors use different degrees of a crime for negotiation in plea deals is beyond the scope of this textbook, but a worthy investigation.

As Pope John Paul II said in the opening quote, “Violence is a crime against humanity, for it destroys the very fabric of society.” Crimes against people are incredibly harmful to the victim, their loved ones, the community, and beyond. Scholars Thomas Underwood and Nancie Palmer explained, “With the victim at the center, crime is like a pebble in a pond; it ripples, extending its impact outward.” It is this extreme and extending harm that guides the criminal justice system in addressing such crimes.

7.10.1 Application Exercises

• Investigate the specifics of crimes against people in your state. Identify what factors your state considers for identifying different degrees of each crime. Compare the laws in your state to another state of interest to you.
• Consider a typical bar fight. What details of the encounter would you need to consider to decide how to charge the individuals involved?
• Visit the resources listed in this chapter for intimate partner violence and for rape . Learn what they offer and how you can support others with these resources.
• Review the full list of sex crimes for which sex offender registry is required in Oregon at https://www.oregon.gov/osp/programs/sor/pages/offenderinformation.aspx . Do you agree or disagree with the practice of public registry for these crimes?

7.10.2 Discussion Questions

• How do actus reus  and mens rea  factor into different degrees or types of homicide and what are the important distinctions?
• What are the differences between simple assault, aggravated assault, and intimate partner violence?
• How was the  legal definition of rape updated? What were the changes to consent requirements?
• Are there any offenses in the list of sex crimes that surprise you? How about any you disagree with?
• What are the important factors in a robbery when determining its degree? Why do you think these are the only factors considered in this decision? Are there any others you would add?

7.10.3 Key Terms

• Aggravating factors
• Causation in fact
• Concurrence
• Corpus delicti
• Crimes against property
• Crimes against the person
• Culpability
• Failure to act
• Intimate partner violence
• Legal causation
• Misdemeanor
• Mitigating factors
• Moral Penal Code
• Objective foreseeability
• Premeditation
• Voluntary action

7.10.4 Summary

All crimes are classified based on their type and severity under the law. First, crimes are grouped by subject matter into crimes against the person and crimes against property. Then, crimes are classified by level of severity. This classification directly affects the level of punishment tied to the crime. A felony is the highest (worst) level of severity of a crime and of the associated punishment. A misdemeanor is considered a less serious crime and a violation is the least serious type of crime. Crimes are then classified by the level of degree. Degrees start with first for the highest, most severe level and end with forth for the lowest, least severe level. First-degree crimes are the ones considered the absolute worst and carry the greatest punishment. This classification is decided based on several factors, including use of a deadly weapon, premeditation, gruesome or particularly violent actions, special victims, protected victims, and motive. The classification of a crime as second-degree means there was something involved that made the crime slightly less bad or just more understandable. These are called mitigating factors. Third-degree crimes are those with more mitigating factors or a little less harm done. The lowest classification is fourth-degree. These are crimes committed by negligence or recklessness and can sometimes be considered “near accidents.” Almost every crime has two main elements: criminal intent, also called mens rea and a criminal act, also called actus reus . Mens rea and actus reus  must be proven together, with concurrence.

Homicide is one human being causing the death of another and is not always criminal. A justifiable homicide is when the criminal action was justified by the threat they believed to exist against themselves or someone else. An excusable homicide claim centers on the person’s mental state when they committed the killing. Criminal homicides are those killings identified by the law as being unacceptable (neither justifiable nor excusable) and for which someone must be held accountable. First-degree murder is the highest classification of murder and results in the most extreme punishment available. Second-degree murder is a homicide that nearly rises to the level of seriousness as first-degree but has some sort of mitigating factor that rationalizes the killing to some extent. Manslaughter is an unlawful killing that occurs without malice or murderous purpose.

Assault   is a crime where one person commits or threatens to commit unwanted or uninvited physical contact on another person resulting in harm. Simple assault can include threatening to hit someone, but not actually doing it. Aggravated assault is physical contact that causes serious bodily injury or bodily injury that is caused by a deadly weapon. What was once termed “domestic violence” is now referred to as   intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV is an assault that occurs between people in a close relationship.

Rape is defined by the U.S. Department of Justice as, “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim” (DOJ, 2012). Rape is charged according to degrees, much like murder and other crimes against persons. Each jurisdiction specifies their own very detailed factors that are used to determine the degree of the crime.

Robbery is a crime against a person involving force, violence, or threat that poses a risk of injury or death to the robbery victim or other innocent bystanders. The degrees of robbery are determined by weapons (real or not) and whether or not the robber is alone. There are three degrees for robbery (first, second, and third).

7.10.5 Resources

• Learn more about intimate partner violence at the National Domestic Violence Hotline website at https://www.thehotline.org/ including statistics, research, and resources.
• Learn more about sexual assault at the National Sexual Assault Hotline website at https://www.rainn.org/ including statistics, research, and resources.
• Find registered sex offender information for any area of the United States at the National Sex Offender Public Website at https://www.nsopw.gov/ .

7.10.6 Licenses and Attributions for Conclusion

“Conclusion” by Jennifer Moreno is licensed under CC BY 4.0 .

 Introduction to Criminology Copyright © by Taryn VanderPyl. All Rights Reserved.

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Crime Conclusion Essay Example

• Pages: 2 (455 words)
• Published: September 1, 2017
• Type: Excerpt from a book

According to Michael Haralambos and Martin Holborn, authors of Sociology: Themes and Perspectives, they noted the issue of crime in urban areas. "It has long been recognized that some areas of towns or cities have higher levels of reported crime and deviance than others. While some neighborhoods are quite safe, in others 'walking the streets at night' could be perilous as official statistics show that crime is concentrated mainly in urban areas. Much more attention has been given in recent years to ways of preventing crime.

Many people vehemently believe that crime will be reduced when some of the social factors that seem to be closely linked with it are improved . These include a lack of education, peer influence, drugs and alcohol, lack of parental relations and proper role models in society,unemployment, the media since many

of the youths are influence by the negative messages being sent by the new wave of artist who incessantly preach about " Being gangster" and "Get rich or die trying" . Further influence caused by decreased government revenue within the country and Reduced quality of life with a drop in the standard of living for the citizens due to high inflation rates and this new global recession .

In A Society Under Seige written by Ramesh Deosaran, the following quote was taken. "Law and order must rest on the wider framework of political accountability, judicial accountability and public morality if the issue of crime should be corrected." This I believe is true since the government are taking no serious initiatives to reduce crime within this country but only spending excessively on Infrastructure and other issues which are not pertinent fo

the development of the country.

Crime has topped the list of the most problematic factors for doing business in T&T, according to Jeff Snipes, assistant professor of criminal justice. The report showed that 21.9 per cent of the business executives surveyed found crime and theft to be the most problematic factors for doing in T&T.

. T&T had a murder rate of 550 in 2008. As of January 26, 2009, 42 murders were recorded. Regarding inflation, T&T scored at 96 out of the 134 economies polled.

Below are the responses for the most problematic factors for doing business in T&T in six other areas:

* Inflation-15.3 per cent

* Poor work ethic in national labour force-14.7 per cent

* Corruption-13.2 per cent

* Inefficient government bureaucracy-11.0 per cent

* Inadequate supply of infrastructure-5.7 per cent

* Inadequately educated workforce-5.1 per cent

"In Trinidad I don't think there is the sense that they had a good police department that suddenly went bad," Snipes says. "The police service has always been challenged. Certain changes in societal conditions, coupled with ineffective police action, have spurred rising crime rates."

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• How to conclude an essay | Interactive example

How to Conclude an Essay | Interactive Example

Published on January 24, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 23, 2023.

The conclusion is the final paragraph of your essay . A strong conclusion aims to:

• Tie together the essay’s main points
• Show why your argument matters
• Leave the reader with a strong impression

Your conclusion should give a sense of closure and completion to your argument, but also show what new questions or possibilities it has opened up.

This conclusion is taken from our annotated essay example , which discusses the history of the Braille system. Hover over each part to see why it’s effective.

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

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Table of contents

Step 1: return to your thesis, step 2: review your main points, step 3: show why it matters, what shouldn’t go in the conclusion, more examples of essay conclusions, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about writing an essay conclusion.

To begin your conclusion, signal that the essay is coming to an end by returning to your overall argument.

Don’t just repeat your thesis statement —instead, try to rephrase your argument in a way that shows how it has been developed since the introduction.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Next, remind the reader of the main points that you used to support your argument.

Avoid simply summarizing each paragraph or repeating each point in order; try to bring your points together in a way that makes the connections between them clear. The conclusion is your final chance to show how all the paragraphs of your essay add up to a coherent whole.

To wrap up your conclusion, zoom out to a broader view of the topic and consider the implications of your argument. For example:

• Does it contribute a new understanding of your topic?
• Does it raise new questions for future study?
• Does it lead to practical suggestions or predictions?
• Can it be applied to different contexts?
• Can it be connected to a broader debate or theme?

Whatever your essay is about, the conclusion should aim to emphasize the significance of your argument, whether that’s within your academic subject or in the wider world.

Try to end with a strong, decisive sentence, leaving the reader with a lingering sense of interest in your topic.

The easiest way to improve your conclusion is to eliminate these common mistakes.

Don’t include new evidence

Any evidence or analysis that is essential to supporting your thesis statement should appear in the main body of the essay.

The conclusion might include minor pieces of new information—for example, a sentence or two discussing broader implications, or a quotation that nicely summarizes your central point. But it shouldn’t introduce any major new sources or ideas that need further explanation to understand.

Don’t use “concluding phrases”

Avoid using obvious stock phrases to tell the reader what you’re doing:

• “In conclusion…”
• “To sum up…”

These phrases aren’t forbidden, but they can make your writing sound weak. By returning to your main argument, it will quickly become clear that you are concluding the essay—you shouldn’t have to spell it out.

Don’t undermine your argument

Avoid using apologetic phrases that sound uncertain or confused:

• “This is just one approach among many.”
• “There are good arguments on both sides of this issue.”
• “There is no clear answer to this problem.”

Even if your essay has explored different points of view, your own position should be clear. There may be many possible approaches to the topic, but you want to leave the reader convinced that yours is the best one!

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• Literary analysis

This conclusion is taken from an argumentative essay about the internet’s impact on education. It acknowledges the opposing arguments while taking a clear, decisive position.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

This conclusion is taken from a short expository essay that explains the invention of the printing press and its effects on European society. It focuses on giving a clear, concise overview of what was covered in the essay.

The invention of the printing press was important not only in terms of its immediate cultural and economic effects, but also in terms of its major impact on politics and religion across Europe. In the century following the invention of the printing press, the relatively stationary intellectual atmosphere of the Middle Ages gave way to the social upheavals of the Reformation and the Renaissance. A single technological innovation had contributed to the total reshaping of the continent.

This conclusion is taken from a literary analysis essay about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . It summarizes what the essay’s analysis achieved and emphasizes its originality.

By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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Your essay’s conclusion should contain:

• A rephrased version of your overall thesis
• A brief review of the key points you made in the main body
• An indication of why your argument matters

The conclusion may also reflect on the broader implications of your argument, showing how your ideas could applied to other contexts or debates.

For a stronger conclusion paragraph, avoid including:

• Important evidence or analysis that wasn’t mentioned in the main body
• Generic concluding phrases (e.g. “In conclusion…”)
• Weak statements that undermine your argument (e.g. “There are good points on both sides of this issue.”)

Your conclusion should leave the reader with a strong, decisive impression of your work.

The conclusion paragraph of an essay is usually shorter than the introduction . As a rule, it shouldn’t take up more than 10–15% of the text.

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If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, July 23). How to Conclude an Essay | Interactive Example. Scribbr. Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/conclusion/

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Critical criminological perspectives all broadly refer to a strain of criminology that views crime as the product of social conflict; unequal power and social relations; and processes of labelling and meaning-making. As a result, critical criminologies have invited a radical reconfiguring of our focus from ‘criminal justice’ to ‘social justice’.

Critical criminological approaches departed from the positivist origins of mainstream criminology that had focused primarily on the search for the causes of crime, rather than questioning the basic category of ‘crime’. These critical approaches began to focus instead on the processes by which the law is made, and by which, therefore, individuals and groups become criminalised. The emergence of critical criminology represented a stark shift in criminological thinking. In this course you have been introduced to a number of key ideas and clusters of theories that rejected concepts of individual and social pathology in preference to frameworks that examine crime and deviance through processes by which certain behaviours are defined, labelled and policed by the state (Scraton and Chadwick, 1991).

Review Questions

• What is ‘critical’ about critical criminological perspectives?
• In what ways does the ‘social construction of law’ help us to further understand crime and criminality?
• What biases and discriminations exist in the criminal justice system and why?
• Why is critique a ‘necessity’ in analyses of crime and justice? How does it promote human rights and social justice?

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Introduction to Crime Essay: Structure and Format

Table of Contents

All writings on crime have the same objective – to find and assist. Any cause-and-effect relationships you uncover can help you understand the problem more.

It can also develop new techniques for preventing, minimizing, or dealing with crimes and criminals and expose numerous other relevant information.

This article features the best way to report your crime essay. Just follow the essay structure guidelines and start writing!

How to Write a Proper Crime Essay

Writing an essay on crime is nearly identical to writing any other essay. However, you must be specific with the content you provide in your essay.

Endeavour to verify the credibility and accuracy of any Internet sources you use. It is also prudent to rely on data and numbers.

In addition, choosing a narrow topic for your essay is preferable, as this will make it more interesting and newsworthy. If you select a topic that is too wide, you will end yourself writing about everything and nothing. Choosing a restricted topic, however, may be challenging due to the scarcity of available knowledge.

Therefore, study your issue and locate the sweet spot. Let’s get unto how to properly outline a crime esssay.

Outline: Introduction to Crime Essay

Every essay should have three sections: introduction , body, and conclusion.

They may also have paragraphs to facilitate reading comprehension. When you have finally decided on a topic, creating an outline is a good idea. This is where you will emphasize each section of your essay. Here is a free sample of an essay outline.

1. Introduction

This is where you give all the background information needed to understand your ideas. It is the foundation of your research. You could also explain what the words mean, if necessary.

2. Body section

The main body is where you put all of your ideas. Find out if more men or women commit crimes. Try to answer the question “why” or find an answer. 

Race and immigration

Look at which groups of people are more likely to commit crimes. Also, look into how being an immigrant can affect criminal behavior.

List the things that may have happened in a person’s early life that led them to commit crimes later. Trauma, family size and relationships, alcoholism and drug addiction, bullying, and poor school achievement might cause this.

A few studies have looked at how religion might affect criminal behavior. Find out if religion makes crime worse, how, and why. Maybe the effects of different religions are different.

Political ideology

Look into different political ideas and how they influence people to act. Are there any that seem to make people want to break the law? 

Psychological traits

Talk about how a person’s psychological background can affect them. Give some examples of mental illnesses that can make people violent or destructive. Find some numbers to back up your claims. 

Socioeconomic factors

Look at which groups of people are more likely to commit a crime and why. Explain how the economy in the family, the city, and the country may affect criminal behavior. You could even write an essay about poverty and crime.

3. Conclusion

In your conclusion, wrap up everything you’ve said. Remember that you don’t need to say or think anything new here.

4. References

Add a list of the sources you used in your essay (if required).

Argumentative Essay on the Root Causes of Criminal Behavior

Of course, the government and law enforcement agencies work to reduce crime (which is a great goal, by the way).

But it continues to happen.

Most people don’t have a clue as to its origins, and that’s a big concern. Because “just mad” is rarely the answer, we need to raise our understanding of the reasons behind criminal behavior.

Here are a few things to think about if you decide to write such an essay:

1. Certain physical traits

People still think that people with certain physical traits are more likely to commit crimes. It is said that these people have smaller heads, more prominent jaws and ears, and a certain height and weight. 

2. Illnesses of the mind and psychological disorders

Some illnesses make people more likely to be violent. For instance, some people with schizophrenia be psychotic or possess psychotic symptoms.

3. Social status

Those considered outcasts or someone with a hard life are more likely to have a more challenging time succeeding. This is why you have the lower social groups committing crimes against those considered higher in the social strata.

4. Poor Economies

The same is true for the economy. When a country is poor, there is more crime. It was found that people with less education are more likely to commit a crime than people with more education.

5. Unemployment

Also, unemployment is considered one of the most common reasons people break the law. If people cannot find employment, they may commit crimes as an alternative to getting a job.

6. White-collar crime

White-collar crime is common among deputies and high-ranking government officials. They include taking bribes, abusing power, being too busy, and other things.

The criminal justice system is an exciting topic for research papers and analytical essays.

Crime is, unfortunately, ever-present, and there is a wealth of data and statistics from which you may draw answers to your specific issues.

While crime rates are rising in every community, I believe both governments and individuals can improve. On the one hand, governments can take several significant steps to minimize or even eliminate various forms of crime.

To begin, governments can increase the number of police officers in every community to keep an eye on citizens and deter criminal behavior. Secondly, the state can use cutting-edge technologies like surveillance cameras in all public areas to prevent illegal activity.

Strong sanctions like incarceration, physical punishments, or financial fines may reduce crime since they dissuade people of all ages.

Members of the society can also play a significant role in reducing crime rates. The vast majority of people are willing to help the government maintain a secure society, from my experience.

Ordinary people may play a crucial role in crime-prevention efforts simply by reporting issues to the police. When citizens are invested in reducing violent crime in their cities, it provides the government with an opportunity to take preventative measures.

In a nut shell, all members of society, including governments and people, must prevent crime for a community to be safe.

Abir Ghenaiet

Abir is a data analyst and researcher. Among her interests are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. As a humanitarian and educator, she actively supports women in tech and promotes diversity.

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Crime Commitment and Punishment Essay (Critical Writing)

Crime commitment is a history-long and complicated social issue that has been addressed by many nations in a different way. Regardless of the variations between the views on the characteristic features of a crime and proper ways for punishment, one idea remains commonly relevant; namely, crimes are the results of delinquent behavior. Consequently, crime is committed by delinquents or people who have a desire, a need, or a psychological inclination to break the law. In my opinion, crimes are commonly committed by individuals whose judgment is impaired due to the strong adverse social influence. I believe that criminal activity is the result of social learning, which is why individuals who are raised in underprivileged communities or observe law-breaking since their youth are more likely to engage in unlawful behavior.

As for the crimes that our country should focus on, they should include the ones that have the most significant damage as the outcome. For example, murder, serial murders, and rape should be addressed with a particular level of precision since they result in the loss of human lives or significant psychological trauma. On the other hand, the crimes that the law enforcing system should concentrate on should include not only the most serious offenses but also those prevailing in contemporary society but not sufficiently addressed. For example, assault, bullying, and discrimination are some of the issues that require special attention.

Finally, the punishment that is required for crimes should be aligned with a general perspective of the corrective system on the interplay between delinquency and its outcomes for an offender. Indeed, I think that the law-enforcing system should work toward shifting from punishing to correcting the behavior of the individuals who commit crimes. While imprisonment is a valid punishment for severe crimes, it is important to implement correctional activities. They should be aimed at restructuring the psyche of the criminals and helping them learn new behaviors that would allow them to become law-abiding citizens in the future.

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IvyPanda. (2022, October 9). Crime Commitment and Punishment. https://ivypanda.com/essays/crime-commitment-and-punishment/

"Crime Commitment and Punishment." IvyPanda , 9 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/crime-commitment-and-punishment/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Crime Commitment and Punishment'. 9 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Crime Commitment and Punishment." October 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/crime-commitment-and-punishment/.

1. IvyPanda . "Crime Commitment and Punishment." October 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/crime-commitment-and-punishment/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Crime Commitment and Punishment." October 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/crime-commitment-and-punishment/.

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Cyber Crime Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on cyber crime.

Cyber Crime Essay – Everybody thinks that only stealing someone’s private data is Cyber Crime. But in defining terms we can say that ‘Cyber Crime refers to the use of an electronic device (computer, laptop, etc.) for stealing someone’s data or trying to harm them using a computer.

Besides, it is an illegal activity that involves a series of issues ranging from theft to using your system or IP address as a tool for committing a crime.

Types of Cyber Crime

Speaking in a broadway we can say that Cyber Crime are categorized into four major types. These are Financial, Privacy, Hacking, and Cyber Terrorism.

The financial crime they steal the money of user or account holders. Likewise, they also stole data of companies which can lead to financial crimes. Also, transactions are heavily risked because of them. Every year hackers stole lakhs and crores of rupees of businessmen and government.

Privacy crime includes stealing your private data which you do not want to share with the world. Moreover, due to it, the people suffer a lot and some even commit suicide because of their data’s misuse.

In, hacking they intentional deface a website to cause damage or loss to the public or owner. Apart from that, they destroy or make changes in the existing websites to diminish its value.

Modern-day terrorism has grown way beyond what it was 10-20 years ago. But cyber terrorism is not just related to terrorists or terrorist organizations. But to threat some person or property to the level of creating fear is also Cyber Terrorism.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Cyber Crime in India

Web world or cyberspace is a massive community of millions and billions of users and websites. Also, people access it for different uses like shopping, movies, music, video games, transactions, and e-commerce, etc.

In this Age of Technology and easy access to the internet, anyone can easily reach it. Because of this fast pace growth from the previous decade. Besides, the internet has opened a world of information on which anyone can connect.

Due to, this the rate of crime especially the rate of Cyber Crime has increased much fold. Moreover, the rate of circulation of data is also increased much fold due to the higher speed of internet. Above all, due to all these issues, the Cybersecurity has become a major concern for society.

Laws related to Cyber Crimes

To stop the spread of Cyber Crime and to safeguard the interest of people the government has made several laws related to Cyber Crimes. Also, these laws serve as protection against Cyber Crime. Apart from that, the government has also introduced cyber cells in police stations to counter the problem of Cyber Crime as fast as they can.

Ways of stopping Cyber Crime

Cyber Crime is not something which we cannot deal with our self. Likewise, with little use of our common sense and logic, we can stop Cyber Crimes from happening.

To conclude, we can say that Cyber Crime is a dangerous offense to someone’s privacy or any material. Also, we can avoid Cyber Crime by following some basic logical things and using our common sense. Above all, Cyber Crime is a violation of not only law but of human rights too.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [{ “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What is the main cause of Cyber Crime?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “The greed for quick money and the desire to get famous quickly are the two main reasons of Cyber Crime. Also, most of the targets of Cyber Crime banks, businessman, financial firms, etc.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What is the punishment of Cyber Crime in India?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”:”If the person is found guilty then there are several punishments based on the level of crime. A simple crime can cost you a fine while a bigger crime can lead you to jail.”} }] }

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Criminal Procedure — Crime Scene Report Examples

Crime Scene Report Examples

• Categories: Criminal Procedure

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Words: 260 |

Published: Mar 25, 2024

Words: 260 | Page: 1 | 2 min read

Table of contents

Example of a crime scene report, type of incident: burglary, reporting officer: detective john smith, description of the scene:, evidence collected:, witness statements:, investigator's observations and conclusions:.

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What books are on your night stand?

The craft anthology “How We Do It,” edited by the great Jericho Brown, and Shayla Lawson’s astounding “How to Live Free in a Dangerous World.”

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Probably on the smoking patio of a wine bar at happy hour on a sunny day, with a pencil in my hand and Dorothy Ashby or Ambrose Akinmusire playing through noise-canceling headphones. Or just a quiet morning on my couch with coffee, so engrossed I forget to flip the record.

What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?

“Erasure,” by Percival Everett . I picked up a used copy at Shakespeare & Company recently — after seeing Cord Jefferson’s brilliant adaptation , “American Fiction” — and even on a reread, it made me laugh out loud from the first page.

The last book that made you cry?

Weird or obnoxious if I say my own? Before that, it was probably Y.A.

Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

That category’s filled to the brim and beyond by reality TV.

How do you organize your books?

Loosely or not at all. This is much to the horror of my Virgo pals, and while I used to take pride in navigating my shelves on familiarity alone, it’s something I’ve vowed to work on. Still, I doubt I’ll ever be an alphabetical type, and clearly I find genre segregation constricting. I do group things thematically, or even interpersonally — music biographies, Black Panthers, Harlem Renaissance; Jessica Hopper is next to John Giorno, and Chase Berggrun’s “R E D” is next to “Dracula”; Julie Buntin’s “Marlena” is beside her husband Gabe Habash’s “Stephen Florida”; Alison C. Rollins is next to her partner Nate Marshall is next to his bestie José Olivarez. At some point Hilton Als’s “White Girls” ended up next to “Male Fantasies,” and I don’t think I’ll ever separate them.

Which genres do you avoid?

There’s an essay in “You Get What You Pay For” where I mention reading a self-help book (as recommended by my now-former psychiatrist). I’d never read one before and have not since.

How does your poetry relate to your essay writing?

The truth is that poetry is under everything. It’s the lyric and sensory backbone. It’s what drives the sound, pace and imagery. (Everyone knows the best prose writers write and read poetry.) But while a poem strives for precision of language, the essay strives for precision of thought, even argument. In a poem, you can build (or approximate) an argument by plopping two images next to each other. It persuades by pointing. Writing these essays felt like pulling apart a long piece of taffy — I found myself reiterating a lot of what I’ve already expressed in poems, so it almost became a project of stretching out each poetic line, breaking down each concept to its root. The process is about asking, pondering, searching — and letting language take part in the answering.

You have a knack for terrific book titles. How did you name your new collection?

Thank you! I love a good title, but I also acknowledge the high bar I have set for myself. With this one, I struggled a bit, I think because it took me a while to understand the book myself, let alone how to introduce it to the world. The essays encompass a lot of seemingly disparate themes and even tonal registers, so framing the overall collection was daunting. I’d been tossing around a couple of options, including “Cheaper Than Therapy,” which appears as an essay title, when Jay-Z made the choice for me. I was in Italy at a residency, grieving the recent loss of my aunt and watching the “Big Pimpin’” video over and over as I worked on an essay about it for the book. I’d left my heavily tabbed copy of “Decoded” at home in Los Angeles, but was scrolling a PDF for details about the video shoot when I came across the line: “If the price is life, then you better get what you paid for.”

You describe yourself as foolish for believing “words could be the pathway to empathy and writing an active resistance against hate.” Might publishing this book change your mind?

Honestly? It’s my only hope.

What’s the last book you recommended to a member of your family?

“Heavy,” by Kiese Laymon, to my mom; Blair LM Kelley’s “ Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class,” to my dad; and “A Is for Activist,” to my 8-month-old cousin.

What do you plan to read next?

Phillip B. Williams’s “Ours” was just published, and I’ve been excited about it for literally years. Vinson Cunningham’s “Great Expectations” came out the same day as my book, so I plan to make that my tour read.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin — but I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t get just as much fun and fulfillment from a night with Angel Nafis, Danez Smith and Saeed Jones.

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James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success  of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”

How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject , has answers.

You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it .

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Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

When the supreme court ended affirmative action, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions.

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024.

Amanda Loman / AP

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” wrote Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds.

FILE - Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor.

Jose Luis Magana / AP

Writing about feeling more comfortable with being Black

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, his first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child. Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “I wrestled with that a lot.”

Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

Related: Oregon colleges, universities weigh potential outcomes of US Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

Essay about how to embrace natural hair

When Hillary Amofa started writing her college essay, she told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

Hillary Amofa, laughs as she participates in a team building game with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. "I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping," said the 18 year-old senior, "And I'm just like, this doesn't really say anything about me as a person."

Charles Rex Arbogast / AP

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

Related: Some Oregon universities, politicians disappointed in Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

The first drafts of her essay didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay describes how she came to embrace her natural hair. She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“Criticism will persist,” she wrote “but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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Should college essays touch on race? Some feel affirmative action ruling leaves no choice

When the supreme court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions..

By The Associated Press

5:20 AM on Mar 28, 2024 CDT

CHICAGO — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

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Related: Gov. Abbott issues executive order fighting antisemitism at Texas colleges

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Do schools ‘expect a sob story’?

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

Related: Texas colleges risk millions if they break DEI ban, lawmaker says

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

Ruling prompts pivots on essay topics

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Ore., had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process. They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Related: Dallas approves more than $30 million in contracts to improve sidewalks citywide

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Spelling out the impact of race

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black.

Related: Federal appeals court questions legality of Texas immigration law

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Will schools lose racial diversity?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair. She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

By Collin Binkley, Annie Ma and Noreen Nasir of The Associated Press

The Associated Press

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The telltale signs of essays written using ChatGPT

Cambridge researchers claim to have identified a number of key features of the AI tool writing style

Cambridge researchers claim to have discovered the “telltale” signs of essays written using ChatGPT .

Repetition of words, paragraphs starting with “however”, and numbered lists with items are all giveaways that the artificial intelligence tool helped write text, a study has found.

Cambridge University Press and Assessment compared essays written by three first-year undergraduate students with the aid of ChatGPT, with 164 essays written by IGCSE students.

IGCSE is an international qualification which is the equivalent of a GCSE taken by UK pupils.

The essays were marked by examiners, the undergraduates interviewed and their essays analysed.

The study found essays written with the help of ChatGPT performed poorly on analysis and comparison skills compared to essays written without such assistance.

But ChatGPT-assisted essays performed strongly on information and reflection skills.

Researchers identified a number of key features of the ChatGPT writing style, which included repetition of words or phrases and ideas, the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning, and Latinate vocabulary.

Essays written with the help of ChatGPT were also more likely to use paragraphs starting with words like “however”, “moreover”, and “overall”, and numbered lists with items.

The researchers said ChatGPT’s default writing style “echoes the bland, clipped, and objective style that characterises much generic journalistic writing found on the internet”.

The report said: “The students found ChatGPT useful for gathering information quickly.

“However, they considered that complete reliance on this technology would produce essays of a low academic standard.”

Concerns about cheating

The study comes after the rise of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, sparked concerns about cheating among pupils in the education sector.

Last year, universities including Cambridge , Oxford and Edinburgh banned students from using the technology in assessed work.

However, Russell Group universities have signed up to a set of principles to help ensure students are “AI literate” to make them more employable in the future.

The group said last summer that the principles will “shape institution and course-level work to support the ethical and responsible use of generative AI, new technology and software like ChatGPT”.

Staff will also be trained to use AI when they are teaching.

Lead researcher Jude Brady, of Cambridge University Press and Assessment, said: “Our findings offer insights into the growing area of generative AI and assessment, which is still largely uncharted territory.

“Despite the small sample size, we are excited about these findings as they have the capacity to inform the work of teachers as well as students.”

She added: “We hope our research might help people to identify when a piece of text has been written by ChatGPT.

“For students and the wider population, learning to use and detect generative AI forms an increasingly important aspect of digital literacy.”

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Easter 2024

Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. (AP Video: Noreen Nasir)

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

• Copy Link copied

Hillary Amofa, laughs as she participates in a team building game with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa, second from left, practices with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, stands for a portrait outside of the school in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

*Hillary Amofa, reflected right, practices in a mirror with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait outside of the school in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

Hillary Amofa, left, practices with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa sits for a portrait after her step team practice at Lincoln Park High School Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

FILE - Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

CHICAGO (AP) — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Hillary Amofa, reflected right, practices in a mirror with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WONDERING IF SCHOOLS ‘EXPECT A SOB STORY’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

A RULING PROMPTS PIVOTS ON ESSAY TOPICS

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process . They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

Max Decker reads his college essay on his experience with a leadership group for young Black men. (AP Video/Noreen Nasir)

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

SPELLING OUT THE IMPACT OF RACE

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black .

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WILL SCHOOLS LOSE RACIAL DIVERSITY?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

Hillary Amofa reads her college essay on embracing her natural hair. (AP Video/Noreen Nasir)

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair . She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

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