See something, say something? Examining variation in willingness to report suspicious activity to police across racial and ethnic groups

Purpose While a host of individual-level and situational factors correlate with willingness to report common crimes, far less is known about willingness to report suspicious activities related to terrorism, which is essential to terrorism prevention. We address two questions: How do incident-level and situational factors impact willingness to report suspicious activity to the police? And, to what extent are these factors racially invariant? Design/methodology/approach We conducted an online conjoint experiment with four samples of US adults: White, Black, Hispanic and Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim. Participants viewed suspicious scenarios derived from the National Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI) and then indicated their willingness to report each to police. Findings Black participants indicated a lower willingness to report than other racial groups. Neither the suspicious behavior’s frequency nor whether it was criminal was consistently related to willingness to report – and these findings were largely racially invariant. Situational factors like relation to the suspect and expected community response present a more complex – and racially variant – picture. Originality/value Prior research on public willingness to report terrorism-related suspicious activity has (1) been limited to survey experiments in which scenarios explicitly mentioned terrorism or in which the suspect’s identity was manipulated and (2) sampled either the broader public or the Muslim community specifically. The present study advances scholarship in two ways by (1) examining how the type of suspicious behavior – identified by the National Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI) – impacts willingness to report and (2) collecting data from four racial/ethnic subsamples to examine racial invariance.