Scrutinizes the effects of race on police decisions to take juvenile offenders into custody. This article addresses the contradictory evidence of racial bias found in the research literature; development of the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which accounts for the age, sex, and race of both the victim and the arrestee; and analyzes NIBRS data to determine the characteristics of violent crimes and the presence of racial bias. Among the key findings were that white juvenile offenders were significantly more likely to be arrested than were their nonwhite counterparts; an offender’s race was correlated with likelihood of arrest for aggravated assault, robbery, and simple assault, but not for intimidation or violent sexual assault; offenders in a multiple-victim incident were more likely to be arrested than were offenders in a single-victim incident; and arrest odds decreased if more than one offender was involved in an incident and increased if a victim was injured, an adult, a male, or white. Overall, the NIBRS data offer no evidence to support the hypothesis that police are more likely to arrest nonwhite juvenile offenders than their white counterparts, but indicate an indirect bias effect in the arrest of nonwhite juveniles when the victim is white.
