The "discovery" some 35 years ago that police officers selectively enforce the law coincided with the period in which conflict and labeling theories featured extralegal variables as significant factors in the operation of formal social control. This coincidence of criminological emphases had a tremendous impact on the social scientific search for understanding of how and why the police exercise their arrest powers. Armed with these new insights into police behavior, researchers virtually ignored crime as an important predictor of arrest. This led to the development of a body of knowledge that is almost devoid of information about how crime affects arrest and one that may misrepresent the true effects of extralegal factors. Recent research shows that by bringing crime back in as a central variable in the study of police arrest decisions, future research can provide a clearer picture of the relative effects of crime factors and extralegal variables on police decisionmaking. 15 references