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Crime and Police Strength in an Urban Setting - Chicago, 1947-1970 (From Quantitative Criminology - Innovations and Applications, P 129-148, 1982, John Hagan, ed. - See NCJ-88809)

NCJ Number
88815
Author(s)
A J Lizotte; J Mercy; E Monkkonen
Date Published
1982
Length
20 pages
Annotation
By incorporating Marxist theory into models analyzing police strength, the authors conclude that the rate of surplus value in manufacturing along with other indicators of the strength of capital explain all the effects of black population size on either strength or crime in Chicago over the 1947-70 period.
Abstract
This research operationalizes the rate of surplus value as the dollar value added by manufacture, divided by wages to production workers, using data collected from Skogan's 'Chicago Since 1840: A Time Series Handbook,' the Uniform Crime Reports, and the Census of Manufacturers. The final estimated path model predicting surplus value, crime, and police strength exhibits a high correlation between percentage black and surplus value, suggesting that the expropriation of surplus value is closely tied to maintaining a low wage, minority labor force. The model's enforcement side shows that average firm size, business failures, and weak minority population all predict police strength. For example, the budget which reflects the economic climate is a major influence on police strength. Black population size also affects police strength independent of the amount of crime produced by that population. Police expenditures and police per capita do not influence crime rates, but rather average firm size, traffic citations and arrests, the property crime rate, and the violent crime rate lagged 1 year all predict the rate of violent crime. These findings lend plausibility to a model measuring economic power as the rate of surplus value and challenge the notion that inadequate socialization of black families or a block subculture explain differential black crime rates. The article includes charts, tables, 5 footnotes, and 32 references.