Prior police contacts and police discretion with apprehended youth

"This report is concerned with the police decision concerning the clearance of an incident: whether to lay a charge, or deal informally with the alleged offender. Police in Canada have the duty to enforce the law, but the authority not to charge in any particular case - even the most serious cases. Multivariate analysis of UCR2 data has been used in the past to study factors affecting police decision-making with youth. The novelty of the present research lies in its creation and use of a variable operationalizing the number of times in the past that the young person had been apprehended by the police.--Document."
"This report is based on analysis of data from a non-representative subset of police forces reporting to the incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR2) from 1995 to 2001. Results were obtained by linking records from 1995 to 2001 pertaining to the same individual. This is the first time research has been done using UCR2 records that are linked longitudinally."@en