What Can the Police Do About Violence?

James Q. Wilson
Additional contact information
James Q. Wilson: Harvard University

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1980, vol. 452, issue 1, 13-21

Abstract: Most people assume that the police can do little to stop violence, but there is little evidence for that assump tion. The police have frequent contact with both communal and stranger/instrumental violence, contacts which might allow effective interventions. If police records tabulated violent crimes according to the relationships of victims and offenders, rather than according to the legal categories, if police departments mounted careful experiments to test the effects of different ways of dealing with communal violence, and if the police made greater efforts to detect and confiscate illegally carried guns, then the police might—or might not— be more successful in reducing violent crime.

Date: 1980
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271628045200102 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:452:y:1980:i:1:p:13-21

DOI: 10.1177/000271628045200102

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().