Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk (2016) explore the relationship between police violence and the amount of citizen crime reporting within Black communities, in order to understand whether there is a causal connection between the two variables. They note that legal cynicism can diminish residents’ reporting of crime in the short run, and that in the long run, this cynicism becomes incorporated into the community. “Such episodes likely contribute to that very cynicism by being incorporated into the community’s collective memory. We believe collective memory explains why we found “the Jude effect” to be particularly strong in black neighborhoods.” (p. 872) In this case, what term best describes “legal cynicism” in its relationship to unemployment and offending?
a. moderator
b. extraneous
c. statistical control
d. mechanism
e. none of these
