Mobilization of Criminal Law in Russia: Empirical Analysis of Victimization Survey Data

The decision of a crime victim to contact the police can be considered the most influential in criminal justice. This is due to the fact that throughout the world a large proportion of crimes do not reach the attention of law enforcement agencies, constituting the so-called dark figure of crime. Russia is no exception. The level of unrecorded crime in this country is about eight times higher than that officially registered by police statistics. Deciding whether to report to the police about the incident, citizens act as filters at the very beginning of a potential criminal process. The purpose of this study is to identify the presence and nature of the relationship between the different characteristics of the crime and the social status of the victim, and the likelihood of reporting on it to law enforcement agencies, as well as the success of the report. The main theoretical framework of the study is the theory of the mobilization of law, developed by Donald Black, a key author in the sociology of law. According to the theory, law is described as governmental social control which can be accessed and mobilized by both law enforcement officers and ordinary citizens. Victim crime reporting is considered as an example of the mobilization of law by citizens, who turn to law as a way of dealing with problems they encountered. This study examines adult residents of Russia who have become crime victims in Russia for the last five years. The major subject of the study is the behavior associated with the mobilization of law or its absence. This study relies on the newest data from the Russian Crime Victimization Survey (2018), the first representative crime victims survey in Russia. With the help of logistic regression, these data provide an answer to the main research question: is there a relationship between the characteristics of the victim and the crime, and the nature of the mobilization of law with regard to this crime in Russia? The results shed light on the structural determinants of the most important decision in criminal justice – the decision to pick up the phone and call the police.