Modeling Impacts of Policing Initiatives on Drug and Criminal Careers of Arrestees in New York City, New York, 1999

This study sought to understand the accuracy and validity of arrestee self-reports of drug use and the overall contact of arrestees with the criminal justice system, with a secondary focus on how arrestee self-reports of drug use correspond to urinalysis results. Moreover, this study investigated whether arrestees were aware of the New York City Police Department's Quality-of-Life (QOL) policing efforts and whether they had changed their criminal behavior as a result. A QOL Policing Supplement, designed to explore new means of evaluating police behavior, was administered to all adult arrestees in the five boroughs of New York City (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Queens) who had completed an Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program interview, provided a urine specimen, and were willing to answer additional questions concerning QOL policing. Part 1, Policing Study Data, is a large integrated dataset containing all of the variables derived from the 1999 ADAM interviews, the Policing Supplement instrument, and administrative records data from the Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) and the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. This dataset is linked, via an anonymous case number, to Part 2, Arrestee Criminal History Data, which contains each arrestee's official criminal history.

A fundamental and continuing problem in sociology and criminology is assessing the validity and accuracy of a respondent's self-reports on various phenomena of interest. Generally, criminological research has used data either from self-report surveys or from official records, but rarely from both sources. Many studies present information based entirely upon official criminal history data, but have no self-report information from offenders. Other studies rely solely on self-report data, ignoring the official record. Research has shown that it is possible that an arrest event might lead to an inaccurate self-report. During the 1990s, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) introduced numerous innovations intensifying its efforts to reduce crime and restore order. One central aspect of that change, quality-of-life (QOL) policing, emphasized the control of minor misbehaviors that were highly visible, such as fare-beating, aggressive panhandling, graffiti writing, and sleeping on public benches. In the past, these minor offenses would have been mostly ignored. QOL policing was designed to send a message to offenders that various disorderly behaviors would not be tolerated. In the mid-1990s, the NYPD targeted these QOL behaviors for arrest. The primary focus of this study was to understand the accuracy and validity of arrestee self-reports of drug use and the overall contact of arrestees with the criminal justice system, with a secondary focus on how arrestee self-reports of drug use correspond to urinalysis results. Moreover, this study sought to investigate whether arrestees were aware of NYPD's QOL policing efforts and whether they had changed their criminal behavior as a result.

The data for this research came out of the New York City Policing Study (hereafter the Policing Study), a research project designed to explore new means of evaluating police behavior. The Policing Study used the relatively novel technique of interviewing arrested individuals in order to obtain insights about policing and its potential effect on the arrestees' illegal activities. The Policing Study was also intended, in part, to document the value of self-report information provided by adult arrestees about their drug use, offending patterns, contacts with the criminal justice system, and the impacts of the QOL policing initiatives upon their routine criminal activities. The Policing Study was a supplement to the research platform provided by the National Institute of Justice's Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program (see ARRESTEE DRUG ABUSE MONITORING (ADAM) PROGRAM IN THE UNITED STATES, 1999 [ICPSR 2994]). Since 1987, the ADAM program (formerly the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program, see DRUG USE FORECASTING IN 24 CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES, 1987-1997 [ICPSR 9477]) has obtained, on a quarterly basis, drug histories and urine samples from arrestees on a voluntary basis at Manhattan's central booking facility. Starting in July 1998, ADAM was expanded to include samples of arrestees from all five boroughs of New York City (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Queens). Data from the ADAM program provide powerful indicators of the prevalence of various illicit drugs among arrestees and of drug use trends over time. ADAM is the only major ongoing survey of drug use that employs an empirical validity check, namely urine tests, to corroborate self-reported drug use. Several interviewers from the ADAM program were used to recruit subjects and administer both the ADAM protocol and the Policing Supplement instrument. Interviewers followed ADAM procedures for selecting respondents and administered the ADAM instrument in use during 1999. Immediately afterwards, interviewers gave arrestees an informed consent form for participation in the Policing Study. If the arrestee agreed, the interview was conducted immediately. During the informed consent process, subjects were asked for written permission to have the interviewer record their arrest number, arrest date and time, and other personal identifying information. Subjects were informed that the project would obtain their criminal histories from New York City and state agencies that retain such information. Respondents were promised $15 after release for completing the questionnaire. First, ADAM and Policing Supplement data files were matched and merged using the ADAM bar codes, creating a combined Policing-ADAM dataset. Next, arrest-related and other identifying data were used to obtain defendant and court processing information from the New York Criminal Justice Agency (CJA), and official criminal record information from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). Prior arrests outside of New York State, in the federal system, or before age 16 were not obtained. Before obtaining the data, information transfer agreements governing access to and use of the information were negotiated with both agencies. New York State law permits transfers of official criminal histories, including sealed cases, to professional researchers for legitimate research purposes. Researchers obtained both sealed and unsealed criminal events by collaborating with DCJS to create an anonymous research dataset. The end result of all data collection efforts was two datasets. The first was a large integrated dataset containing all of the variables derived from the ADAM program (including urinalysis results), the Policing Supplement instrument, and dispositional information from CJA (Part 1, Policing Study Data). This dataset was then linked, via an anonymous case number, to a second dataset containing each arrestee's official criminal history (Part 2, Arrestee Criminal History Data). For Part 1, several QOL questions regarding cigarettes and truancy were excluded from analysis because there were too few Policing Study respondents under the age of 18. For Part 2, the criminal histories are provided as several records, with each record representing an arrest, a sentence, or related information for a given individual. For each subject, research staff aggregated the data across event records to create counts and develop various measures of criminal history contacts.

Demographic variables for Part 1, Policing Study Data, include gender, race/ethnicity, age of arrestee, educational attainment, marital status, employment status, and living circumstances of each arrestee. The file also contains variables such as an arrestee's spatial perception regarding their current arrest (e.g., ZIP code of arrest, intersection of arrest, and kind of place where arrest occurred), QOL offenses (e.g., fare-beating, gang membership, unlicensed vending, prostitution/public solicitation, littering, graffiti, drag racing, and loitering), the impact of QOL policing on their behaviors and activities, criminal justice history, contact with the criminal justice system, perception of neighborhood activity, institutional and agency contact history, serious behaviors and offenses, and whether the respondent had been a victim of a variety of specified crimes. Other Part 1 variables include New York penal codes, offense codes, legal and illegal sources of income, and the arrestees' history of use, dependence on, and abuse of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin, PCP, amphetamines, barbiturates, quaaludes, methadone, crystal meth, valium, and LSD/acid. Part 2, Arrestee Criminal History Data, variables include age at arrest, arrest date, crime date, date of disposition, geographical region of arrest, arrest charge details, arrest charge class category, arrest charge Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) code, violent felony offense (VFO), firearm, child victim, drug, weapon, DWI arrest and conviction indicators, disposition charge class category, disposition charge UCR code, and whether an arrestee was eligible for probation.

ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..

Presence of Common Scales: None.

Response Rates: Approximately 96 percent of ADAM subjects who were approached agreed to participate in and completed the Policing Supplement.

Datasets:

• DS0: Study-Level Files
• DS1: Policing Study Data
• DS2: Arrestee Criminal History Data