LGBTI Variations in Crime Reporting: How Sexual Identity Influences Decisions to Call the Cops

Research shows that people vary in their willingness to report crime to police depending on the type of crime experienced, their gender, age, and their race or ethnicity. Whether or not lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) and heterosexual people vary in their willingness to report crime to the police is not well understood in the extant literature. In this article, I examine variations in LGBTI respondents’ attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control on their intentions to report crimes to the police. Drawing on a survey of LGBTI individuals sampled from a Gay Pride community event and online LGBTI community forums (N = 329), I use quantitative statistical methods to examine whether LGBTI people’s beliefs in police homophobia are also directly associated with the behavioral intention to report crime. Overall, the results indicate that LGBTI and heterosexual people differ significantly in their intention to report crime to the police, and that a belief in police homophobia strongly influences LGBTI people’s intention to underreport crime to the police.