Annotated Bibliographies

McAfee, J.K., Cockram, J., & Wolfe, P.S. (2001). Police reactions to crimes involving people with mental retardation: A cross-cultural experimental study. Education and Training in Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, 36 (2), 160-171.

This article discusses the overrepresentation of people with mental retardation in the criminal justice system, particularly in issues related to sexual crimes. In this study police officers in Western Australia and Pennsylvania were asked to indicate the ir likely responses to crime reports, some of which involved people with mental retardation as either victims or the alleged assailants of the crimes. The study revealed that officers responded differently to crimes involving people with mental retardatio n; however the response patterns were not consistent. In some cases, police were more tolerant of the disability; in others they were less tolerant. Overall, the research indicated that police officers were influenced by the presence of mental retardation , but they were unsure of how they should react to the disability. It should be noted that one limitation of this study is that the research and subsequent result was based on simulation; police may respond quite differently to real crimes. A second indic ation in the study is that experience and training had virtually no impact on response patterns, however, several possible explanations were given for this phenomenon.