Morals Influence Whether Police Encounters Deter Young Offenders

European Society of Criminology Best Article Award for publication

Police encounters do deter young offenders: The more often police detect them, the more risk-aware they become, and the more likely it is that they will abstain from criminal actions. However, this is not equally true for all adolescents, but for young persons with deviant morals in particular.
These are the results of a recently published study led by Florian Kaiser, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, that will play an important role in shaping police work. He was awarded the Best Article Award by the European Society of Criminology (ESC) for his publication “Differential updating and morality: Is the way offenders learn from police detection associated with their personal morals?”.
 

Previous criminological studies had revealed that adolescents reconsider criminal actions and are more likely to abstain from criminal conduct if they perceive the risk to be detected by police to be high. In a new study involving around 1,400 adolescents, a group of researchers led by the Freiburg-based criminologist and sociologist Florian Kaiser have now explored the role of police encounters in the past and assessed which groups of adolescents are most likely to be influenced by such encounters.

The comprehensive survey “Crime in the modern City” asked young persons whether they had committed crimes in the past and which ones; if the answer was yes, they were prompted to list how often the police had become aware of these crimes. In addition, the researchers asked the adolescents to assess the risk of being caught when committing various crimes and to evaluate the actions morally by indicating how bad they considered each type of criminal behavior.

The result: Not all young offenders who have previously been detected by police are similarly affected by the experience in terms of their perception. Persons with weak morals—i.e., non-conforming morals that deviate from the law—have a considerably increased perceived detection risk following experiences of police detection. Conversely, previous police encounters have little influence on risk perception in adolescents with stronger morals. According to the researchers, this may be due to the fact that persons with strong morals may not have to be deterred in the first place, as they rarely or never consider committing crimes; consequently, risk perceptions are of no relevance. “Nevertheless, these differentiated results hold the potential to be of great importance for sanction research and police work,” explains Florian Kaiser.

Previously, there had been no consensus amongst experts on whether increased police deployment has a deterrent effect on young offenders. This new study suggests that police encounters definitely do hold the potential to influence risk perception, at least in a certain group of adolescents. Florian Kaiser’s conclusion: “Ideally, these increased risk perceptions then prevent young people from committing further crimes.”

The results of the study are detailed in the research paper “Differential updating and morality: Is the way offenders learn from police detection associated with their personal morals?”, which was published in the European Journal of Criminology last year. It was awarded the Best Article Award 2023 by the European Society of Criminology (ESC). Author Florian Kaiser and co-authors Björn Huss and Marcus Schaerff accepted the award during the 24th Annual Conference of the ESC in Bucharest, Romania, on September 11.