How Many Violent Crimes Were Precipitated or Provoked?
The issue of the victims’ roles in street crimes was systematically explored in the late 1960s by the National Commission on the Causes and Preven- tion of Violence (NCCPV). As its name suggests, the blue-ribbon panel was searching for the roots of the problem and for practical remedies. If large numbers of people were found to be partly at fault for what happened to them, then changing the behavior of the general public might be a promising crime-prevention strategy. Social scien- tists working for the commission took a definition of victim precipitation derived from previous stud- ies by criminologists and victimologists, and they applied it to four types of crimes: murders, aggra- vated assaults, forcible rapes, and robberies. Then they drew a sample of reports from police files
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from 17 cities and made a judgment in each case about whether the person who was attacked shared any responsibility with the assailant.
Victim-precipitated homicides (defined as situations in which the person who died was the first to resort to force) accounted for 22 percent of all murder cases in the 17 cities: as much as 26 percent in Philadelphia (Wolfgang, 1958; see above), and as high as 38 percent in Chicago (Voss and Hepburn, 1968). About 14 percent of aggravated assaults were deemed to be precipitated (in which the seriously injured person was the first to use physical force or even merely offensive lan- guage and gestures, sometimes referred to as “fight- ing words”). Armed robberies were committed against precipitative individuals “who clearly had not acted with reasonable self-protective behavior in handling money, jewelry, or other valuables.” Eleven percent of the holdups in the 17 cities were deemed to be precipitated, about the same as in a study conducted in Philadelphia (Normandeau, 1968). Forcible rapes that led to arrests were desig- nated as precipitated if the woman “at first agreed to sexual relations, or clearly invited them verbally and through gestures, but then retracted before the act.” Only 4 percent of all rapes were classified as precipitated in the study of 17 cities. However, as many as 19 percent of all sexual assaults in Philadelphia were deemed to be precipitated by females (Amir, 1967). (This controversial notion of victim-precipitated rape will be explored and cri- tiqued in Chapter 10.)
The commission concluded that instances of victim complicity were not uncommon in cases of homicide and aggravated assault; precipitation was less frequent but still empirically noteworthy in robbery; and the issue of shared responsibility was least relevant as a contributing factor in rapes (National Commission on the Causes and Preven- tion of Violence, 1969b; Curtis, 1974).
Research projects that look into victim com- plicity have shed some light on the role that alcohol plays in terms of precipitation and provocation. Alcohol is a drug (a depressant) and its consumption has been implicated even more consistently than the use of illicit drugs in fueling interpersonal
conflicts leading to fatal outcomes or serious injuries (see Spunt et al., 1994; Parker, 1995). For example, the UCR’s Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHRs) for 2013 reveal that “brawls due to the influence of alcohol” claimed many more lives than “brawls due to the influence of narcotics” (121 compared to 58 in 2010; 93 compared to 59 in 2013) (FBI, 2014).
The first comprehensive analysis of urban mur- ders (in Philadelphia around 1950) determined that the victim, the offender, or both were drinking before the killing took place in 64 percent of the cases (Wolfgang, 1958). Reports from medical examiners in eight cities in 1978 revealed that the percentage of corpses testing positive for alcohol ranged from a low of 38 percent to a high of 62 percent (Riedel and Mock, 1985). In New York City between 1973 and 1997, the proportion of victims who had been drinking before they were murdered was as low as 29 percent and as high as 42 percent, according to autopsies performed by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (Karmen, 2006). In a study of nearly 5,000 homi- cides committed in Los Angeles between 1970 and 1979, researchers reported that they detected alco- hol in the blood of nearly half the bodies autopsied. The blood-alcohol content in about 30 percent of these 5,000 murder victims was high enough to classify the person as intoxicated by legal standards at the time of death. The typical alcohol-related slaying involved a young man who was stabbed to death in a bar on a weekend as the result of a fight with an acquaintance or even a friend (Goodman et al., 1986).
Binge drinking is a dangerous practice that some people—including college students—have slipped into. Two mechanisms explain the link between consuming large quantities of alcohol and violence due to precipitative or provocative conduct. The selective-disinhibition perspec- tive suggests that if one person binges—or worse yet, if both parties do—judgment will become clouded, and these individuals are likely to misin- terpret each other’s intentions, cues, and actions, and then behave in a less restrained manner. The outlet-attractor perspective proposes that at
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certain drinking locations (such as liquor stores, bars, and clubs) people gather with the expectation that they will seek “time out” from normal con- straints and act “out of character” in an “anything goes” environment (Parker and Rebhun, 1995).
Some outbreaks of mortal combat that arise from intense conflicts—often fueled by alcohol— can be viewed as the outcome of a sequence of events in a transaction. The initial incident might be a personal affront, perhaps something as minor as a slur or gesture. Both the offender and the victim contribute to the escalation of a character contest. As the confrontation unfolds, at least one party, but usually both, attempts to “save face” at the other’s expense by not backing down. The battle turns into a fatal showdown if both participants are steeped in a tradition that favors the use of force as the way to settle bitter disputes (Luckenbill, 1977). Recall that the largest category in the listing of “circumstances” comprised people who were slain as a result of a dispute of some kind. Most of the deaths that resulted from these fights were unplanned and led to manslaughter indictments and convictions.