Crime Quiz

Priscilla Gabriel, 445 words

            In the articles, "The enduring racial divide in death penalty support" and "An investigation of reporting violence to the police: A focus on Hispanic victims" they both looked at the different factors that could have led to the racial divide within their results. In the first article "The enduring racial divide.." they looked at different explanations for the racial divide of supporters for capital punishment. For example, they looked at their socioeconomic status, the differences in political party and ideology, religious orientation, and their support for the right-to-life. This article mainly focused on Whites and Blacks. As they were researching they found many reasons as to why they couldn't count on some factors to determine the reasoning for the racial divide. There were many great findings with their research however, it wasn't tested enough to be considered valid information. They began to gather this information to make a more in-depth survey to get more data. Once these findings were accurately tested more and in depth there were even more problems that they found. In their findings, their results didn't come out correctly and were missing some data for certain answers. This just made it harder for them to find what the real reasoning was behind the racial divide of death penalty support. At the end of the article they explained that with the lack of data they needed, it meant that none of the explanations for the racial divide could be accurate to show if they affected the results or not. The second article "An investigation of reporting violence…" was like this one because it also looked at different races and what the results were of the different races. This article was comparing the results of what percentage of the time crime was being reported to the police. They looked at Hispanics, non-Hispanic Whites, and non-Hispanic Blacks. Within these different races, they could find similarities in the characteristics of people who reported crime to the police. One finding they collected was that a similar characteristic between all three races was a female who is more likely to report a crime. They also found that a similar characteristic that was least to be reported is the crime of rape/sexual assault against a female. There was also a similarity between Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks which is a never married female who has gone through rape/sexual assault and is uninjured. This result is for those who least reported a crime to the police. To gather this data they had to call people ages twelve and older every six months to get information and to see how and if it changes as time goes on.