This study examines social disorganization theory using calls to the police during 1980 in 60 Boston neighborhoods. These data, based on complainant reports of crime rather than official police reports, allow further investigation of differences in findings based on victimization data and official crime data. The rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are regressed on poverty, mobility, racial heterogeneity, family disruption, and structural density. Interaction terms for poverty and heterogeneity, poverty and mobility, and mobility and heterogeneity are also explored. Results from this study support findings from recent victimization studies and earlier ecological studies using official counts of crime. Poverty and heterogeneity, along with family disruption and structural density, are found to be important ecological variables for understanding the distribution of crime rates among neighborhoods.

This paper examines the cases of 1017 homicide defendants in Florida. Two main data sources are used: the police department's classification of the case, as found in the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports, and the prosecutor's classification, as determined by court records. Each data set characterizes the homicide as involving felonious circumstances, possible felonious circumstances, or nonfelonious circumstances. Attention is focused on cases that differ in their police and prosecutorial classifications. Results indicate that differences in these classifications are related to defendant's and victim's race, with blacks accused of killing whites the most likely to be “upgraded” and the least likely to be “downgraded.” The process of upgrading is then shown to significantly increase the likelihood of the imposition of a death sentence in cases with white victims where no plea bargain is offered.

Problem-oriented policing has been suggested as a promising way to understand and prevent complex gang violence problems. A number of jurisdictions have been experimenting with new problem-oriented frameworks to understand and respond to gun violence among gang-involved offenders. These interventions are based on the "pulling levers" deterrence strategy that focuses criminal justice and social service attention on a small number of chronically offending gang members responsible for the bulk of urban gun violence problems. As part of the US Department of Justice-sponsored Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative, an interagency task force implemented a pulling levers strategy to prevent gang-related gun violence in Lowell, Massachusetts. Our impact evaluation suggests that the pulling levers strategy was associated with a statistically significant decrease in the monthly number of gun homicide and gun-aggravated assault incidents. A comparative analysis of gun homicide and gun-aggravated assault trends in Lowell relative to other major Massachusetts cities also supports a unique program effect associated with the pulling levers intervention.

In this critique of Professor Ehrlich's recent research on capital punishment,' we conclude that he has failed to provide any reliable evidence that the death penalty deters murder. His data are inadequate for the purposes of his analysis and he misapplies the highly sophisticated statistical techniques he employs. We begin with an evaluation of the data he uses to measure the critical variables in his theoretical formulation and then consider flaws in his analysis which would invalidate his conclusions even if his data were adequate. We conclude by explaining how Ehrlich's analysis produces results which seem consistent with the deterrence hypothesis when in fact they are not. 2 I. Inadequacies in Ehrlich's Data The credibility of Ehrlich's conclusions depends on the quality of the data he has used. For measures of the variables at the core of his theoretical analysis, he relies on the Uniform Crime Reporting System (UCRS) of the FBI. 3 The behavior he seeks to explain (the dependent

No abstract