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Are U.S. Cities Underpoliced? Theory and Evidence
Abstract
We document the extent of measurement errors in the basic data set on police used in the literature on the effect of police on crime. Analyzing medium to large U.S. cities over 1960 to 2010, we obtain measurement error-corrected estimates of the police elasticity. The magnitudes of our estimates are similar to those obtained in the quasi-experimental literature, but our approach yields much greater parameter certainty for the most costly crimes, the key parameters for welfare analysis. Our analysis suggests that U.S. cities are substantially underpoliced. © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
... Although burglary in Bristol Borough is not seemingly affected by the investment, the decline in burglaries in Wabash is marginally significant across both estimation strategies. Using costs per crime common in the literature ( Cohen and Piquero, 2009;Chalfin and McCrary, 2018 ), we estimate that the statistically significant declines in larceny and burglary equate to an average annual savings of roughly $10 0,0 0 0 for Wabash and $83,0 0 0 for Bristol Borough in the years following the award. 2 Thus, although the $50 0,0 0 0 SBR investment is concentrated among select small businesses in a winning town, the benefits from crime reduction are more expansive and quickly offset the "cost" of the initial investment. ...
... Crime counts are obtained by multiplying the percent effects from Fig. 7 by the value of the pre-treated means described in Table 3 . Costs per crime are obtained from ( Chalfin and McCrary, 2018 ) and converted to 2016 dollars. ...
... To estimate the economic impact from reduced crime, we incorporate the societal costs of crime estimated in Cohen and Piquero (2009) and Chalfin and McCrary (2018) and pair these values with the statistically significant estimated effects on larceny and burglary offenses described in Fig. 7 . Costs of crime are converted to 2016 dollars to coincide with the first year of the SBR investment. ...
Small businesses are vital to the municipalities they serve. Significant government resources and geographically-targeted economic policies are allocated toward enhancing their presence and impact on the community. In this paper, we exploit a television show contest among small towns for a $500,000 revitalization award to study the impact of place-based economic policies on crime. We use a difference-in-differences approach and synthetic control techniques and find significant declines in property crimes for two of the three winning towns examined. Our results shed light on the positive spillover effects of place-based initiatives and the effectiveness of these investments as a crime reduction strategy in small towns. We estimate a savings from fewer crimes of between $80,000 to $100,000 annually following the year the investment occurs.
... We use two juvenile arrest measures: (i) per capita arrest costs and (ii) arrest rate per 1000 juveniles. The former is our preferred measure as per capita costs account for differences across arrests in their costs to society (Chalfin & McCrary, 2018). To measure treatment access, we utilize variation in the number of offices of physicians and non-physicians specializing in mental healthcare per county obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns (CBP). ...
... The arrests we study have heterogeneous costs to society. For example, in terms of criminal justice system and victim costs, a homicide is over 3000 times more costly than a burglary (Chalfin & McCrary, 2018). From the perspective of the social planner, arrests that impose higher social costs are more important for improving welfare. ...
... From the perspective of the social planner, arrests that impose higher social costs are more important for improving welfare. Indeed, Chalfin and McCrary (2018) argue that the costs associated with reducing property crimes likely exceed the expected benefits to society while lowering violent crimes is socially optimal (i.e., expected benefits exceed expected costs). This backdrop-not all arrests are equally important in terms of social costs but resources must be allocated to reduce any arrests-impacts how we measure arrests in our study. ...
We estimate the effect of local access to office‐based mental healthcare on juvenile arrest outcomes. We leverage variation in the number of offices of physicians and non‐physicians specializing in mental healthcare in a county over the period 1999–2016 in a two‐way fixed‐effects regression. Office‐based treatment is the most common modality of mental healthcare received by juveniles. We find that 10 additional offices of physicians and non‐physicians specializing in mental healthcare in a county leads a decrease of 2.3%–2.6% in the per capita costs to society of juvenile arrest. Findings are similar for arrest rates although often less precise, which suggests that accounting for social costs is empirically important. Crime imposes substantial costs on society and individuals, and interventions during early life can have more pronounced effects than those received at later stages, therefore our results imply increased juvenile access to mental healthcare may have an unintended benefit for the current and future generations.
... Our estimates imply that replacing Middletown's social connectedness with that of Beloit would decrease murders by 25.4 percent, robberies by 35.2 percent, and motor vehicle thefts by 22.9 percent. By comparison, the estimates in Chalfin and McCrary (2015) imply that a similar decrease in murders would require a 38 percent increase in the number of police officers. The elasticity of crime with respect to social connectedness ranges from -0.05 to -0.25 across the seven commonly studied index crimes of murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, and is statistically distinguishable from zero for every crime besides larceny. ...
... 30 The estimates in Table 3.4 imply that replacing Middletown's HHI with that of Beloit would decrease murders by 25.4 percent, robberies by 35.2 percent, and motor vehicle thefts by 22.9 percent. By comparison, the estimates in Chalfin and McCrary (2015) imply that a similar decrease in murders would require a 38 percent increase in the number of police officers. 31 The effect of social connectedness is even larger in other examples. ...
... 30 For Middletown and Beloit, the number of Southern black migrants is 376 and 407; the 1980 population is 35,207 and 43,719; and the 1980 percent black is 11.3 and 12.0. 31 Chalfin and McCrary (2015) estimate an elasticity of murder with respect to police of -0.67, almost four times the size of our estimated elasticity of murder with respect to social connectedness. versus 0.006). ...
Chapter 1: “The Impact of College Education on Mortality: A Study of Marginal Treatment Effects.” With a newly constructed dataset that links the 2000 U.S. Census long-form to Social Security Administration records, I estimate the effect of college education on mortality. Using the proximity to college from birthplace as an instrument, I estimate the marginal treatment effect (MTE) of college education on 10-year mortality rate for adults aged 60-99 in the United States from 2000-2010. The OLS results show a strong association between college education and lower mortality. The MTE results show that individuals that have unobserved characteristics that make them least likely to attend college have the largest effects of education in reducing mortality. This suggests that the individuals who would benefit most from receiving college education in terms of health are those do not attend college. The positive effects on reducing mortality are solely concentrated among men. For women, I find no evidence of an effect of education on old-age mortality. Combined with evidence from the literature, these results provide suggestive evidence that income is not the mechanism through which education reduces mortality. Chapter 2: “Social Interactions and Location Decisions: Evidence from U.S. Mass Migration.” (with Bryan Stuart) This paper estimates the strength through which social interactions influenced location decisions during two large scale migrations in the United States during early to mid 1900s. We examine the Great Migration of African Americans out of the Southern United States and the Dust Bowl Migration of whites out of the Midwestern U.S. Using long-run data on migration patterns for individuals born 1916-1936, we estimate the effect of social interactions on influencing where individuals decided to migrate. We find that social interactions were very important for African Americans during the Great Migration in affecting location decisions. Our results suggest that 47-69 percent of blacks chose their destination city in the North because of influence from other people that were from their hometown. For whites, we estimate much smaller effects; only 14-24 percent of whites chose their destination city because of social interactions. Chapter 3: “The Effect of Social Migration on Crime: Evidence from the Great Migration.” (with Bryan Stuart) Using results from the second chapter of the dissertation, which shows that social interactions were influential in guiding migration patterns during the Great Migration, this paper estimates the effect these patterns had on crime in U.S. cities from 1960-2009. We document the large variations in the connectedness of migrants from the South that moved to different Northern cities. For example, some cities received almost one-third of their migrants from only one origin town in the South, where other comparable cities received no more than three percent of migrants from any one place. We find that, controlling for other economic characteristics, cities which received more connected migrants had lower crime rates from 1970-2000, which suggests an important role of social connectedness on crime during these periods. The results are largely driven by cities with a high population share of African Americans, and through crime increases among black juveniles. Cities that had more connected migrants had smaller increases in crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s.
... First, there is considerable heterogeneity in the size of the population covered by an agency, and weighting helps recover the average change in crime risk faced by a typical individual in the UCR sample (e.g., it avoids considering the crime rate in a small agency that covers a college campus the same as the crime rate in a large agency that covers an entire dense city). Moreover, there is variance in the reliability of reporting across agencies, wherein agencies that cover larger populations are less prone to noise in crime reporting than smaller agencies (Prescott and Rockoff, 2011;Chalfin and McCrary, 2018). Weighting can help with this measurement error. ...
... 31 We extend the baseline model in several ways. First, in addition to evaluating the effects on aggregated counts of all Part 1 crimes (per 100,000 residents), which implicitly assigns equal severity to each offense, we also evaluate effects on cost-weighted crime following Chalfin and McCrary (2018). This analysis provides an estimate of the policy on the expected cost of crime based on a weighted aggregate of crime counts, with weights equal to the cost of each type of crime. ...
... 31 We report and discuss unweighted estimates later, and our result and conclusions are not largely affected across the weighted and unweighted estimates. 32 Estimating the effect on cost-adjusted violent and property crimes, or the expected cost of crime, as presented in Chalfin and McCrary (2018), takes into account that a policy that prevents a small amount of more socially costly crimes such as homicide could be more cost-effective than a policy that prevents a large amount of less costly crimes such as burglary. 33 The demographics of the victim is missing only in 1.3% of the incidents while the demographics of the offender is missing for 35% of the incidents and therefore the results pertaining the effects on demographics of the offender must be interpreted with caution. ...
We study the effects of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) on crime, and inform how policies that restrict access to Rx opioids per se within the healthcare system would impact broader non‐health domains. In response to the substantial increase in opioid use and misuse in the United States, PDMPs have been implemented in virtually all states to collect, monitor, and analyze prescription opioid data with the goal of preventing its misuse and diversion. Using a differences‐in‐differences approach and data on offenses known to law enforcement from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), we find that mandatory access PDMPs reduced overall crime by 5%, particularly driven by assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft. Overall, these results provide evidence that appropriately designed PDMPs are an effective social policy tool to mitigate some of the negative consequences of opioid misuse, and more broadly indicate that opioid policies can have important spillover effects into crime.
... Our work provides novel contributions to three different literatures. First, our study of the impact of a welfare reform on crime contributes to a body of work where economists have studied the criminogenic effects of changes to the labor market (Raphael and Winter-Ebmer, 2001;Gould et al., 2002;Machin and Meghir, 2004;Edmark, 2005), to the timing of welfare payments (Foley, 2011;Carr and Packham, 2019;Watson et al., 2020), of welfare structure reform (Machin and Marie, 2006;D'Este and Harvey, 2020), and of police numbers (Draca et al., 2011;Chalfin and McCrary, 2018). ...
... 17 There are several papers that focus on the possible simultaneity biases between crime and policing, and use quasi-experimental approaches to measure the causal impact of policing on crime (e.g., Draca et al. (2011)). Chalfin and McCrary (2018) provide an interesting counter to these papers, arguing that what we should be concerned about is more the correct measurement of policing numbers rather than simultaneity bias. In this study, we do not instrument for policing. ...
The UK Welfare Reform Act 2012 imposed a series of deep welfare cuts, which
disproportionately affected ex-ante poorer areas. In this paper, we provide the first evidence of the impact of these austerity measures on two different but complementary elements of crime – the crime rate and the less-studied concentration of crime – over the period 2011-2015 in England and Wales, and document four new facts. First, areas more exposed to the welfare reforms experienced increased levels of crime, an effect driven by a rise in violent crime.
Second, both violent and property crime become more concentrated within an area due to the welfare reforms. Third, it is ex-ante more deprived neighborhoods that bear the brunt of the crime increases over this period. Fourth, we find no evidence that the welfare reforms increased
recidivism, suggesting that the changes in crime we find are likely driven by new criminals.
Combining these results, we document unambiguous evidence of a negative spillover of the welfare reforms at the heart of the UK government’s austerity program on social welfare, which reinforced the direct inequality-worsening effect of this program. Guided by a hedonic house price model, we calculate the welfare effects implied by the cuts in order to provide a financial quantification of the impact of the reform. We document an implied welfare loss of the policy
– borne by the public – that far exceeds the savings made to government coffers.
... 3 To our knowledge, we are the first to estimate an elasticity of criminal behavior with respect to the probability of detection. Previous work on this topic focuses on the elasticities of crime with respect to specific inputs such as police hiring (these estimates range between −0.1 and −2; see, e.g., Chalfin and McCrary 2018;Evans and Owens 2007;Levitt 1997). 4 Our estimates are consistent with this literature's findings, but we show that the underlying elasticities of overall detection are larger than what is previously reported for specific inputs, which is what we would expect if increasing inputs (such as police capacity) by 1 percent increases offenders' detection probability by less than 1 percent. ...
... See Chalfin and McCrary (2017) for a review of this literature.4 Chalfin and McCrary (2018) provide the most precise estimated elasticities of −0.67 for murder, −0.56 for robbery, and −0.23 for burglary. ...
This paper studies the effects of adding criminal offenders to a DNA database. Using a large expansion of Denmark’s DNA database, we find that DNA registration reduces recidivism within the following year by up to 42 percent. It also increases the probability that offenders are identified if they recidivate, which we use to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to the detection probability and find that a 1 percent higher detection probability reduces crime by more than 2 percent. We also find that DNA registration increases the likelihood that offenders find employment, enroll in education, and live in a more stable family environment. (JEL J22, J24, K42)
... A few sites did not experience any crimes over the study period. An approximation to the log value for these data points is obtained using a parametric correction suggested by Chalfin and McCrary (2018). These data points are denoted by a plus sign enclosed within the hollow circle ...
... Accordingly, a 35% reduction in outdoor, nighttime index crimes (confidence interval = 8-55%) means that lighting reduced serious offending in these communities by approximately 4%. To place this estimate in context, we note here that a 4% change in index crimes is approximately what would be expected to occur during an economic recession (Gould et al. 2002;Raphael and Winter-Ebmer 2001) or in response to a 10% increase in police manpower (Chalfin and McCrary 2018;Evans and Owens 2007). Interestingly, the intervention's effect on less serious offending including theft and public order offenses is more muted indicating that this sort of intervention may not have a commensurate impact on all types of offending. ...
Objectives
This paper offers novel experimental evidence that violent crimes can be successfully reduced by changing the situational environment that potential victims and offenders face. We focus on a ubiquitous but understudied feature of the urban landscape—street lighting—and report the first experimental evidence on the effect of street lighting on crime.
Methods
Through a unique public partnership in New York City, temporary street lights were randomly allocated to 40 of the city’s public housing developments.
Results
We find evidence that communities that were assigned more lighting experienced sizable reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes. We also observe a large decline in arrests indicating that deterrence is the most likely mechanism through which the intervention reduced crime.
Conclusion
Results suggests that street lighting, when deployed tactically, may be a means through which policymakers can control crime without widening the net of the criminal justice system.
... We therefore included these variables as controls in our analyses. The available police resources (measured by the number of sworn police officers per 1000 population and per capita police expenditures) have been theorized in prior studies to affect the amount of police efforts devoted to investigating suspicious circumstances and activities that may help reduce crime, although the literature is still mixed about the mechanisms (e.g., Chalfin & McCrary, 2018;Levitt, 2002;Loftin & McDowall, 1982;Mello, 2019;Owens, 2019). Finally, two binary variables were included to control for differences between counties along the Northern and Southern borders and counties in the interior United States in both violence rates (Orrenius & Coronado, 2005) and in resources and law enforcement activities devoted to enforcing national borders and interior immigration laws (Amuedo-Dorantes & Pozo, 2014). ...
Research Summary: Our understanding of how immigration enforcement impacts crime has been informed exclusively by data from police crime statistics. This study complements existing research by using longitudinal multilevel data from the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2005-2014 to simultaneously assess the impact of the three predominant immigration policies that have been implemented in local communities. The results indicate that the activation of Secure Communities and 287(g) task force agreements significantly increased violent victimization risk among Latinos, whereas they showed no evident impact on victimization risk among non-Latino Whites and Blacks. The activation of 287(g) jail enforcement agreements and anti-detainer policies had no significant impact on violent victimization risk during the period.
Policy Implications: Contrary to their stated purpose of enhancing public safety, our results show that the Secure Communities program and 287(g) task force agreements did not reduce crime, but instead eroded security in U.S. communities by increasing the likelihood that Latinos experienced violent victimization. These results support the Federal government’s ending of 287(g) task force agreements and its more recent move to end the Secure Communities program. Additionally, the results of our study add to the evidence challenging claims that anti-detainer policies pose a threat to violence risk.
... Consequently, it is not possible to assume that equally large increases in homicides would be observed in other contexts where the police presence decreases less abruptly. In fact, the obtained estimates of the elasticity of homicides to police presence (i.e. between −1.5 and −5.0) are larger than most of those obtained for medium-to-large US cities (see, Chalfin & McCrary, 2018). However, it is not the case that the findings reported here are only valid for the specific region and period under examination. ...
... One may still wonder whether the perverse effect of police on crime stems from a suboptimal level of police protection. For instance, Chalfin and McCrary (2018) suggest that "additional investments in police are unlikely to be socially beneficial unless police reduce violent crimes to at least a moderate degree." We show, however, that it may well be the case that even at the optimal level of police protection a perverse effect of police on crime still emerges. ...
We provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the equilibrium of a Walrasian economy for an increase in police expenditure to induce an increase in crime. It turns out that this is essentially the condition for the Laffer curve to be downward sloping at a given ad valorem tax rate. Notably, such a perverse effect of police on crime is consistent with any appropriation technology and could arise even if the level of police protection is the socially optimal one.
... Consequently, it is not possible to assume that equally large increases in homicides would be observed in other contexts where the police presence decreases less abruptly. In fact, the obtained estimates of the elasticity of homicides to police presence (i.e., between -1.5 and -5.0) are larger than most of those obtained for medium-tolarge US cities (see Chalfin and McCrary 2018). However, it is not the case that the findings reported here are only valid for the specific region and period under examination. ...
This study investigates how an abrupt reduction in policing impacts upon the occurrence of homicides in a violent context in the Global South. The study utilizes a police strike in the Brazilian state of Ceará in summer 2020 as a quasi-natural experiment. Separate SARIMA and Exponential Smoothing models fitted on data on weekly homicide counts from January 2015 to the beginning of the strike are used to generate forecasts of homicides in a virtual counterfactual scenario with no police strikes. Actual homicide counts and forecasts are subsequently compared. The strike led to a statistically significant increase in homicides ranging between 110% and 250%. A difference-in-differences analysis confirms this result. The elasticity of homicides with respect to police presence is tentatively estimated at between -1.5 and -5.0. Even in a violent context, the perception of a higher risk of apprehension induced by police presence acts as a powerful deterrent against homicides.
... A natural strategy is to improve community safety, thereby reducing the perceived protective benefit of being armed. Studies have shown that exogenous increases in the size of local police forces reduce murders (Levitt, 1997;Evans and Owens, 2007;Chalfin and McCrary, 2018;Mello, 2019). These papers use aggregate mortality rates as the outcome of interest and do not examine the impact on rates for specific groups like young black males. ...
... Our main estimates can be seen as lower bounds on property crimes since layoffs of local police forces were explicitly not part of the reform. 39 Decreasing manpower in addition to closing stations would likely add to crime and reduce efficiency (Chalfin and McCrary, 2017a). Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations and information on the average size of insurance claims across theft categories allows us to quantify the direct costs of police station closures. ...
Many countries consolidate their police forces by closing down local police stations. Police stations represent an important and visible aspect of the organization of police forces. We provide novel evidence on the effect of centralizing police offices through the closure of local police stations on crime outcomes. Combining matching with a difference-in-differences specification, we find an increase in reported car theft and burglary in residential properties. Our results are consistent with a negative shift in perceived detection risks and are driven by heterogeneous station characteristics. We can rule out alternative explanations such as incapacitation, crime displacement, and changes in police employment or strategies at the regional level. We argue that criminals are less deterred due to a lower visibility of the local police.
... The most recent systematic review and meta-analysis of research on changes to police force size found a small, nonsignificant effect size on crime (Lee et al., 2016). Studies conducted since Lee et al.'s (2016) review have found significant negative relationships between police force size and crime across a range of crime types, inclusive of murder, rape, robbery, and part-1 property crime (Chalfin & McCrary, 2018;Kaplan & Chalfin, 2019;Mello, 2019). ...
Research Summary
Nightly confrontations occurred between protestors and officers outside of the Seattle Police Department's (SPD's) East precinct in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. On June 8, 2020, the SPD abandoned the East precinct in an attempt to calm the situation. Following closure of the precinct, the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest (CHOP) took hold in the surrounding 6-block area. The CHOP occupation lasted until July 1, 2020. Over this time period, CHOP operated as an autonomous zone, with police officers not patrolling and generally not responding to calls for police service within the area. We used the microsynthetic control group method to analyze the effect of CHOP on crime during the 24-day occupation. Results indicate crime significantly increased in the CHOP zone, the encompassing two-block area, and the overall East precinct service area.
Policy Implications
The current study found comparatively stronger effects than the general literature on depolicing. The significant crime increase is particularly noteworthy given the short time frame of the CHOP occupation and retreat of police from the area theoretically making it more challenging for crimes to be reported by citizens and/or proactively discovered by officers. This suggests that police abolition, the most extreme form of the police defunding movement, may significantly compromise public safety. Moving forward, a prudent policy solution may be to simultaneously support the evidence-based crime prevention work of police and community-based institutions. Such an approach may achieve currently desired policing reforms without risking crime spikes that can result from drastic reductions of police presence. Wide-scale adoption of evidence-based policing may provide a vehicle for such meaningful, long-term reform.
... Of course, police engagement can also create costs for the government, which we will discuss in detail in the next section. Most cost-benefit calculations of policing in the economics literature focus on salary and pension obligations but do not account for monetary costs associated with police behavior that could impact credit risk for local governments (for example, Chalfin and McCrary 2018). A recent report by Moody's noted that police operations contribute several credit risks, including high police pension burdens, expensive settlements and consent decrees, and expenditure pressures (Strungis et al. 2020). ...
The efficiency of any police action depends on the relative magnitude of its crime-reducing benefits and legitimacy costs. Policing strategies that are socially efficient at the city level may be harmful at the local level, because the distribution of direct costs and benefits of police actions that reduce victimization is not the same as the distribution of indirect benefits of feeling safe. In the United States, the local misallocation of police resources is disproportionately borne by Black and Hispanic individuals. Despite the complexity of this particular problem, the incentives facing both police departments and police officers tend to be structured as if the goals of policing were simple—to reduce crime by as much as possible. Formal data collection on the crime reducing-benefits of policing, and not the legitimacy costs, produce s further incentives to provide more engagement than may be efficient in any specific encounter, at both the officer and departmental level. There is currently little evidence as to what screening, training, or monitoring strategies are most effective at encouraging individual officers to balance the crime reducing benefits and legitimacy costs of their actions.
... The ever increasing population along with the rise in urbanization has led to dramatic increases in criminal activities (Fajnzylber et al., 2002;Zhang, 2016), particularly in urban settings (Tumulak and Espinosa, 2017;Stebbins, 2019;Zhu et al., 2019). While increased police presence has been documented to reduce increases in crime (Chalfin and McCrary, 2018), police need to be able to plan for and respond effectively to criminal events, especially those that affect personal or public safety. Police and other forces of civil order would benefit directly from intelligence to help combat all forms of crime and intelligence is a requirement for managing and fighting "intelligent" forms of crime (Tastle, 2013). ...
Neural networks are a machine learning method that excel in solving classification and forecasting problems. They have also been shown to be a useful tool for working with big data oriented environments such as law enforcement. This article reviews and examines existing research on the utilization of neural networks for forecasting crime and other police decision making problem solving. Neural network models to predict specific types of crime using location and time information and to predict a crime’s location when given the crime and time of day are developed to demonstrate the application of neural networks to police decision making. The neural network crime prediction models utilize geo-spatiality to provide immediate information on crimes to enhance law enforcement decision making. The neural network models are able to predict the type of crime being committed 16.4% of the time for 27 different types of crime or 27.1% of the time when similar crimes are grouped into seven categories of crime. The location prediction neural networks are able to predict the zip code location or adjacent location 31.2% of the time.
... To address this issue, most researchers limit analysis to agencies reporting consistently and covering larger populations (Chalfin and McCrary 2018;Cox and Cunningham 2021). Such limitations, though, likely create a non-representational sample to analyze, dampening generalizability. ...
The past four decades brought a fundamental shift in how US governments do their business, evolving from isolated and direct service provision to more networked, collaborative arrangements. Though researchers have performed substantial work developing theory and empirical tests of these new arrangements, the literature has yet to establish effectiveness or efficiency, especially on objective, community-level outcomes. Problem-solving courts (PSCs) present an ideal case for evaluating Collaborative Governance. The difference between these programs and the status quo, some other type of community supervision (e.g., probation), amounts to the very definition of collaboration: meaningful, cooperative engagement between cross-boundary organizations aimed at a shared goal. In this paper I explore cost-benefits of PSCs as a method for understanding Collaborative Governance generally, building upon a stacked event study design and performing counterfactual analysis to estimate total number of crimes prevented and associated cost savings. I find these programs effective at reducing crime at the community level, conservatively estimating returns between $1.98 and $2.47 for every dollar invested, for a total savings between $3.5 and 5.5 billion between 1995 and 2013. These results indicate PSCs, and collaboration, provide outsized benefits for communities.
... Rather than economic marginalization, its "marginalization from the benefits" conferred to others by the police that creates frontier behavior (Goldstein 2003). This logic, coupled with the criminological literature on police presence and its impact on crime guides the inclusion of a variable that addresses police per capita (Shichor et al. 1980;Chalfin and McCrary 2018). INEGI's (2012b) National Census of Table 1 (continued) a Alvaro Obregon was removed from the analysis as it was the only variable for which indicators of structural equivalence were not present. ...
This article builds on the dearth of academic literature explaining the emergence of vigilante groups by incorporating two different theoretical perspectives: collective efficacy and structural equivalence. Through the use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), this research sampled municipalities in the Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoacan and operationalized a set of conditions based on previous research and the aforementioned theoretical perspectives. The results of the QCA demonstrate that collective efficacy was associated with the most unique explanatory pathway and provided the greatest coverage of vigilante group formations. Equally important, the conditions operationalized in this analysis provided for a total of four explanatory pathways that explained each vigilante formation without any contradictory outcomes (non-formations).
... Understanding trends in police turnover is essential. Though the evidence is quite mixed, some studies have shown that more police per capita is associated with lower levels of crimeparticularly violent crime (Chalfin & McCrary, 2018;Chalfin et al., 2020;Kovandzic & Sloan, 2002;Levitt, 1997;Marvell & Moody, 1996;Mello, 2019;Mourtgos & Adams, 2019a). 1 Specific to police resignations, Hur (2014) found that increased rates of voluntary officer turnover are associated with increased rates of violent and property crime. The direct and indirect costs of police turnover extend beyond crime levels, however. ...
Several of the largest U.S. police departments reported a sharp increase in officer resignations following massive public protests directed at policing in the summer of 2020. Yet, to date, no study has rigorously assessed the impact of the George Floyd protests on police resignations. We fill this void using 60 months of employment data from a large police department in the western United States. Bayesian structural time‐series modeling shows that voluntary resignations increased by 279% relative to the synthetic control, and the model predicts that resignations will continue at an elevated level. However, retirements and involuntary separations were not significantly affected during the study period. A retention crisis may diminish police departments’ operational capacity to carry out their expected responsibilities. Criminal justice stakeholders must be prepared to confront workforce decline and increased voluntary turnover. Proactive efforts to improve organizational justice for sworn personnel can moderate officer perceptions of public hostility.
... However, we observe that crime, in general, and robberies and vehicle thefts, in particular, increase in nearby areas. The effects we observe are qualitatively important-a 6-7% increase in robberies and vehicle thefts is equivalent to what we might expect to see if the size of a city's police force were reduced by between 5-15%, depending on the estimate (Evans and Owens 2007;Weisburd 2016;Chalfin and McCrary 2018;Weisburst 2018;Chalfin et al. 2020). These findings have a number of implications for our understanding of both offender behavior and public policy. ...
Objectives
For more than one hundred years, street lighting has been one of the most ubiquitous capital investments in public safety. Prior research on street lighting is largely limited to ecological studies of very small geographic areas, creating substantial challenges with respect to both causal identification and statistical power. We address limitations of the prior literature by studying a natural experiment created by short-term disruptions to municipal street lighting.
Methods
We leverage a natural experiment created by the differential timing of the repair of nearly 300,000 street light outages in Chicago. By conditioning on street segment fixed effects and focusing on a short window of time around the repair of a street light outage, we can credibly rule out confounding factors due to area-specific time trends as well as street segment-level correlates of crime.
Results
We find that outdoor nighttime crimes change very little on street segments affected by street light outages, but that outages cause crime to spill over to nearby street segments. Effects are largest for robberies and motor vehicle theft.
Conclusions
Despite strong environmental and social characteristics that tend to tie crime to place, we observe that street light outages are sufficiently salient to disrupt longstanding patterns. While the impact of localized street light outages can reverberate throughout a community, the findings imply that improvements in lighting can be defeated by the displacement of crime to adjacent spaces and therefore do not necessarily suggest that localized investments in municipal street lighting will yield a large public safety dividend.
... Based on the available data, it appears somewhat unclear if the NPD is appropriately funded and staffed, as such decision-making can be quite complex and there are a variety of methods to determine staffing needs (Wilson and Weiss 2014;. Others have argued that nationally, cities are generally inappropriately staffed with respect to law enforcement (Chalfin and McCrary 2016). Recently, in concert with calls nationwide to reduce police-related spending and downsize departments (Levin 2020), Newark has decided to redirect a small portion of its funding for law enforcement toward other city-wide services (Kieffer 2020). ...
Extant research has documented police interactions between racial and ethnic minority populations, including negative perceptions of and experiences with the police; police corruption and misconduct; and the deleterious effects of negative relationships with the police, such as reduced legitimacy and mistrust. Comparatively, exchanges between lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) populations and the police have received limited attention. This is despite work suggesting that LGBTQ citizens face an elevated risk of victimization, and a possible reticence in reporting their victimization, resulting from negative perceptions of police, fear of mistreatment, or even experiences of harassment and abuse by police. To extend the research in this area, I analyze 12 focus groups with LGBTQ participants (N = 98) in an urban setting to examine the circumstances in which LGBTQ people would seek assistance from the police, when they would avoid doing so, and their justifications for avoiding or contacting the police. I also considered intersectionality in shaping police–citizen interactions between sexual and/or gender minority citizens of color, as the sample was almost exclusively LGBTQ persons of color. I conclude by discussing implications for policing practices and policies.
This Element presents the history, research, and future potential for an alternative and effective model of policing called 'legitimacy-based policing'. This model is driven by social psychology theory and informed by research findings showing that legitimacy of the police shapes public acceptance of police decisions, willingness to cooperate with the police, and citizen engagement in communities. Police legitimacy is found to be strongly tied to the level of fairness exercised by police authority, i.e. to procedural justice. Taken together these two ideas create an alternative framework for policing that relies upon the policed community's willing acceptance of and cooperation with the law. Studies show that this framework is as effective in lowering crime as the traditional carceral paradigm, an approach that relies on the threat or use of force to motivate compliance. It is also more effective in motivating willing cooperation and in encouraging people to engage in their communities in ways that promote social, economic and political development. We demonstrate that adopting this model benefits police departments and police officers as well as promoting community vitality.
Abundant research has investigated general deterrence, a process whereby threats of punishment reduce crime rates. This chapter has several purposes: 1) to briefly explain the rational choice perspective on deterrence; 2) to highlight several empirical challenges to the causal estimation of deterrent effects; 3) to evaluate the evidence for general deterrence from research that takes these challenges to causal estimation most seriously; and 4) to explain how additional perspectives are needed from behavioral economics and psychology to fully understand deterrence, and in particular the empirical regularity that the deterrent capacity of the certainty of punishment far exceeds that of sanction severity.
We exploit police and crime data from California over 26 years to construct a dynamic panel, which is then estimated using Arellano–Bover/Blundell–Bond techniques to address concerns about simultaneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and inertial effects in the policing-crime relationship. We find no evidence that increases in police staffing lead to meaningful reductions in crime through either deterrence or incapacitation. Estimates are not wholly supportive of a compelling relationship between prior criminal offending and current police staffing; providing suggestive evidence that, at least within our sample, simultaneity bias may be more modest in nature than has been previously supposed in prior studies.
We describe crime attributable to the Mariel Boatlift, the 1980 Cuban refugee crisis that increased Miami’s population by nearly 10%. Using synthetic control methods to match Miami with cities that exhibit similar pre-intervention crime patterns, we find the phenomenon comparatively increased property crime and murder rates; we also document weaker but suggestive relative growth in violent crime. Compositional features of the newcomers partially drive results; the disproportionately young, male Cubans’ characteristics highly correlate with illicit activity. However, the degree of prior incarceration and psychiatric institutionalization likely explains the majority of the observed effects. Given the group’s unique composition and the absence of rigorous screening, it likely constitutes the worst observed migration event in terms of public safety in US history. The Marielitos bear little resemblance to other groups of newcomers. Hence, it would be imprudent to use crime connected with the 1980 event we study to inform immigration policy.
Domestic violence remains a serious public problem, especially in Hispanic communities, where one in three women are victims of domestic violence in their lifetimes. Yet $<$50$\%$ of victims report the incidents, often because of concerns over police officers asking about their immigration status of the status of their family members. We assess the extent to which the implementation of sanctuary policies, which limit the cooperation of local law enforcement with federal immigration authorities, affect domestic homicide rates—a crime rarely unreported. We find that sanctuary policies reduce domestic homicides with a Hispanic female victim, especially in counties with more female officers. In contrast, the effect is smaller in magnitude in counties with mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence already in place. Overall, the results are suggestive of the protective role of sanctuary policies in Hispanic communities.
What accounts for the steady decline in misdemeanour arrest rates in the United States following their peak in the mid-1990s? This article links the fluctuation in low-level law enforcement to changes in the budget and staffing resources cities devoted to policing. This materialist explanation contrasts with accounts that emphasize policy changes like the adoption of community policing. Dynamic panel regression analyses of 940 municipalities indicate low-level arrest rates declined most in places that reduced their police expenditure and personnel, net of crime and other controls. The adoption of community policing was unrelated to misdemeanour arrests. Findings suggest lawmakers should consider how increasing police budgets or police force sizes will likely be accompanied by increases in misdemeanour arrests and their attendant harms.
This paper examines the impact of police funding on the fraction of homicides that are cleared by arrest. Using data covering homicides in approximately 50 of the largest US cities from 2007 to 2017, I find no evidence that greater police funding resulted in higher homicide clearance rates. This finding is robust to linear regression and instrumental variable approaches, different ways to measure police budgets, and across victims of different races and in different types of neighborhoods. In summary, the way large city police departments have historically spent their funds, more funding has not helped catch more murderers.
We report novel empirical estimates of the race-specific effects of larger police forces in the United States. Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. In per capita terms, effects are twice as large for Black versus White victims. Larger police forces also make fewer arrests for serious crimes, with larger reductions for crimes with Black suspects, implying that police force growth does not increase racial disparities among the most serious charges. At the same time, larger police forces make more arrests for low-level “quality-of-life” offenses, with effects that imply a disproportionate impact for Black Americans. (JEL H76, J15, K42)
Black Americans are substantially less safe than white Americans, with persistently higher risks of crime victimization. One possible cause of racial disparities in crime victimization may lie in racially disparate law enforcement responses to crime experienced by Black and white victims. We leverage idiosyncratic variation in the litigation of law enforcement agencies for racially discriminatory employment practices to identify changes in the nature of the police response to Black crime victimization. Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey between 1979 and 2004, and a series of estimators appropriate for difference-in-differences designs with staggered treatment, we find that litigation over racially discriminatory employment practices in law enforcement agencies decreased Black crime victimization by magnitudes ranging between 24 - 27%, but had no discernible impacts on white crime victimization, reducing the pretreatment racial gap in crime victimization by 73 - 82%. Decreases in Black crime victimization appear in the first year after litigation onset, consistent with efforts by litigated departments to address racial disparities in the police response to reported crime.
We study the impact on road safety of one-day massive speed limit monitoring operations (SLMO) accompanied by media campaigns that announce the SLMO and provide information on the dangers of speeding. Using register data on the universe of police reported accidents in a generalized difference-in-differences approach, we find that SLMO reduce traffic accidents and casualties by eight percent. Yet, immediately after the SLMO day, all effects vanish. Further evidence suggests that people drive more slowly and responsibly on SLMO days to avoid fines; providing information on the dangers of speeding does not alter speeders' driving behavior in a sustainable way.
Despite a lack of rigorous empirical evidence, reduced crime is often touted as a potential benefit in the debate over increasing border infrastructure (i.e., border walls). This paper examines the effect of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which led to unprecedented barrier construction along the US–Mexico border, on local crime using geospatial data on dates and locations of border wall construction. Synthetic control estimates across twelve border counties find no systematic evidence that border infrastructure reduced property or violent crime rates in the counties in which it was built. Further analysis using matched panel models indicates no effect on property crime rates and that observed declines in violent crime rates precede barrier construction, not the other way around. Taken together, this paper finds that potential crime reductions are not a compelling argument toward the benefits of expanding border infrastructure.
We evaluate the impact of increased policing on criminal behavior by leveraging the quasi-random timing of homicides in jurisdictions where homicides are rare and spur increases in policing. Across jurisdictions, we evaluate offending immediately before and after a rare homicide using a regression discontinuity design in conjunction with high-frequency incident data. We reveal substantial, and precise declines in total and violent crime that are robust to a host of changes in the analysis. We contribute by plausibly isolating the impacts of increased police labor, and explicitly studying policing and offending outside large metropolitan centers.
This publication includes five policy papers on various aspects of human security. Focusing on modern Ukrainian society allows us to raise the question of compliance and/or non-compliance with modern international concepts of human security, to show the existing gaps, and to highlight the problems and processes at the country level, taking into account its local specifics, internal political context, and society overall. This approach allows us to identify key “pain points” and suggest possible formulas and mechanisms for solving the problems on the way to building a society whose members are confident in protecting their rights and freedoms and, most importantly, are actively shaping their future.Discussion of the concept of human security becomes more and more relevant these days, attracting attention not only in the international arena but also in Ukraine. The collected opinions and recommendations will be useful for developing evidence-based decisions and policies, which, in turn, will contribute to the security and well-being of citizens.
We estimate the effect of local access to office-based mental healthcare on crime. We leverage variation in the number of mental healthcare offices within a county over the period 1999 to 2014 in a two-way fixed-effects model. We find that increases in the number of mental healthcare offices reduce crime. In particular, ten additional offices in a county reduces crime by 1.6 crimes per 10,000 residents, or 0.4% relative to the sample mean. Adjusting crimes based on their social costs implies larger effect sizes: ten additional offices reduces crime costs per capita by 2.2%. These findings suggest an unintended benefit from expanding the office-based mental healthcare workforce: reductions in crime.
An estimated 60 million Americans encounter police annually and more than one million are threatened or subjected to police use of force during these encounters. Much research exists on the efficacy for crime control of the policing practices that produce those encounters, but outside of formal consequences such as incarceration, the criminology of police harms has been slower to emerge. In this review, we describe the slow violence that contemporary policing practices disproportionately inflict on people of color. These wide-ranging harms constitute cultural trauma and shape health, well-being, academic performance, government participation, community membership, and physical space. As a result, routine policing practices help create and maintain the racial and class status quo. We close by considering the limits of popular reforms given those harms and urge researchers to take a broader approach by studying nonpolicing alternatives to public safety alongside crime control efficacy and incorporating more critical perspectives to build a more comprehensive assessment of modern policing practices.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 5 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
During the last decade, while national homicide rates have remained flat, New York City has experienced a second great crime decline, with gun violence declining by more than 50 percent since 2011. In this paper, we investigate one potential explanation for this dramatic and unexpected improvement in public safety—the New York Police Department's shift to a more surgical form of “precision policing,” in which law enforcement focuses resources on a small number of individuals who are thought to be the primary drivers of violence. We study New York City's campaign of “gang takedowns” in which suspected members of criminal gangs were arrested in highly coordinated raids and prosecuted on conspiracy charges. We show that gun violence in and around public housing communities fell by approximately one third in the first year after a gang takedown. Our estimates imply that gang takedowns explain nearly one quarter of the decline in gun violence in New York City's public housing communities over the last eight years.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to recognise and provide an approach to estimate the value of an institution that produces a public good to the wealth of a nation. Specifically, the authors value utilitarian justice.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper employs the classical economic theories of crime and shadow pricing to estimate the total economic value and shadow prices or social productivity of police and higher court deterrence. These measures are estimated using the definitions provided by Dasgupta and by re-engineering key deterrence elasticity estimates gleaned from Australian econometric studies.
Findings
The empirical findings suggest a relatively high social value for police and higher court deterrence. Notwithstanding, addressing socio-economic disadvantage is likely to prevent more subsequent offences than directing more resources to the operation of the criminal justice system.
Research limitations/implications
The key limitations involve the sensitivity of the estimates to error. Further work is required on all the estimates in the model and in particular the social costs of the serious offences. The next step is to estimate the opportunity cost of supplying police and court deterrence. The cost estimate can then be combined with the estimates of social benefits to estimate a benefit-cost ratio. The model in broad terms demonstrates a way forward to estimating the economic value of and the social productivity of the criminal justice system. The provision of retributive justice is also ignored in this contribution. This requires a separate analysis.
Social implications
The social implications are that there appears a way to both justify and evaluate the criminal justice system and this methodology may be applied to the operation of other public services.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in suggesting a method to solve the valuation problem for the jointly produced public goods of the higher courts and police.
This paper provides a law enforcement framework through which to consider principal-agent relations among citizens, an elected official, and a law enforcer. This paper investigates how citizens’ interests are reflected in political competitions in terms of the use of financial incentives, e.g., the allocation of fine revenues, to control the intrinsically motivated law enforcer. This paper points out the limitation of using financial incentives to fully internalize society members’ interest in the enforcer's behavior from a normative perspective. Even if appropriate financial incentives are available, these cannot be chosen under political competitions.
This study estimates the impact of the discretionary Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program (EBMGP) on drug arrests and crime. The 1986 and 1988 Anti‐Drug Abuse Act allocated federal funds to state and local municipalities to combat illicit drug use and violent crime associated with drug sales and trafficking. The results show that the implementation of the EBMGP resulted in an increase in police hiring, an increase in drug sales arrest rates for Blacks and Whites, and a decrease in total crime. Nonetheless, Black‐White racial disparity in the drug sales arrest rate still significantly increases by approximately 1 for every 1,000 Black residents. Our findings highlight the role of federal crime control policies in state and local policing. Although, the EBMGP was a color‐blind policy initiative, it was not race neutral in its implementation.
Research Summary
In 2017, Seattle, Washington, became the first city in the United States to increase its minimum wage to $15 per hour, more than double the federal minimum wage. Not only was a $15 minimum wage unprecedented, but the increase was also extremely rapid, with the minimum wage rising by nearly 60% in just 2 years. Using a synthetic differences‐in‐differences estimator, we consider the impact of Seattle's landmark minimum wage legislation on public safety. Although there is speculative evidence for an increase in commercial burglaries, we find little evidence that Seattle experienced a change in its aggregate rate of violent or property offending relative to other U.S. cities. To better understand the mechanisms underlying our findings, we investigate the impacts of the local wage law on employment and earnings for Seattle's low‐skilled labor market. We detect no meaningful adverse effects on the employment rates of low‐wage workers.
Policy Implications
Our results suggest that Seattle increased its minimum wage without compromising public safety. Seattle's experience shows that increasing wages can be a tool for increasing the opportunity cost of crime without reducing employment levels. To the extent that other cities enact higher minimum wages to a level that generates unemployment among low‐skilled workers, public safety changes could be considerably different.
Research Summary We conducted a Campbell systematic review to examine the effectiveness of problem-oriented policing (POP) in reducing crime and disorder. After an exhaustive search strategy that identified more than 5,500 articles and reports, we found only ten methodologically rigorous evaluations that met our inclusion criteria. Using meta-analytic techniques, we found an overall modest but statistically significant impact of POP on crime and disorder. We also report on our analysis of pre/post comparison studies. Although these studies are less methodologically rigorous, they are more numerous. The results of these studies indicate an overwhelmingly positive impact from POP.Policy Implications POP has been adopted widely across police agencies and has been identified as effective by many policing scholars. Our study supports the overall commitment of police to POP but suggests that we should not necessarily expect large crime and disorder control benefits from this approach. Moreover, funders and the police need to invest much greater effort and resources to identify the specific approaches and tactics that work best in combating specific types of crime problems. We conclude that the evidence base in this area is deficient given the strong investment in POP being made by the government and police agencies.
Research Summary
Police officials across the United States are increasingly relying on place-based approaches for crime prevention. In this article, we examine the Safer Cities Initiative, a widely publicized place-based policing intervention implemented in Los Angeles's “Skid Row” that focused on crime and disorder associated with homeless encampments. Crime reduction was the goal. The police division in which the program was undertaken provides 8 years of time-series data serving as the observations for the treatment condition. Four adjacent police divisions in which the program was not undertaken provide 8 years of time-series data serving as the observations for the comparison condition. The data are analyzed using a generalized additive model. On balance, we find that this place-based intervention is associated with meaningful reductions in violent, property, and nuisance street crimes. There is no evidence of crime displacement.
Policy Implications
This study provides further evidence that geographically targeted police interventions can lead to significant crime prevention benefits, with no evidence that crime is simply displaced to other areas. Criminologists and the media have given the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) little credit for major reductions in crime that have occurred during the past 5 years following a number of major policy reforms. We suggest that researchers should look more closely at the targeted interventions the LAPD has undertaken for evidence-based examples of effective policing. Importantly, this work suggests that crime associated with homeless encampments can be meaningfully reduced with targeted police actions. However, law enforcement actions do not address the roots of homelessness nor most of its consequences. Getting tough on the homeless should not be confused with policies or programs that respond fundamentally to the social and personal problems that homelessness presents.
Operation Ceasefire is a problem-oriented policing intervention aimed at reducing youth homicide and youth firearms violence in Boston. It represented an innovative partnership between researchers and practitioners to assess the city's youth homicide problem and implement an intervention designed to have a substantial near-term impact on the problem. Operation Ceasefire was based on the “pulling levers” deterrence strategy that focused criminal justice attention on a small number of chronically offending gang-involved youth responsible for much of Boston's youth homicide problem. Our impact evaluation suggests that the Ceasefire intervention was associated with significant reductions in youth homicide victimization, shots-fired calls for service, and gun assault incidents in Boston. A comparative analysis of youth homicide trends in Boston relative to youth homicide trends in other major U.S. and New England cities also supports a unique program effect associated with the Ceasefire intervention.
Many criminologists doubt that the dosage of uniformed police patrol causes any measurable difference in crime. This article reports a one-year randomized trial in Minneapolis of increases in patrol dosage at 55 of 110 crime “hot spots,” monitored by 7,542 hours of systematic observations. The experimental group received, on average, twice as much observed patrol presence, although the ratio displayed wide seasonal fluctuation. Reductions in total crime calls ranged from 6 percent to 13 percent. Observed disorder was only half as prevalent in experimental as in control hot spots. We conclude that substantial increases in police patrol presence can indeed cause modest reductions in crime and more impressive reductions in disorder within high crime locations.
Research on the relationship between police and crime, like many criminological topics, is subject to uncertain causal direction and omitted controls. We recommend procedures that mitigate these problems: the Granger causality test, proxies for missing variables, robustness checks, and making data available to other researchers. Because specification problems are common in the social sciences, this strategy has applicability beyond the issue of police and crime. We analyze yearly police data and UCR crime rates, at the state and city levels, pooled over two decades. We find Granger causation in both directions. The impact of crime on the number of police is slight, but the impact of police on most crime types is substantial. The latter result is more robust at the city level.
Dealing with physical and social disorder to prevent serious crime has become a central strategy for policing. This study evaluates the effects of policing disorder, within a problem-oriented policing framework, at crime and disorder hot spots in Lowell, Massachusetts. Thirty-four hot spots were matched into 17 pairs, and one member of each pair was allocated to treatment conditions in a randomized block field experiment. The officers engaged “shallow” problem solving and implemented a strategy that more closely resembled a general policing disorder strategy rather than carefully designed problem-oriented policing responses. Nevertheless, the impact evaluation revealed significant reductions in crime and disorder calls for service, and systematic observations of social and physical disorder at the treatment places relative to the control places uncovered no evidence of significant crime displacement. A mediation analysis of the isolated and exhaustive causal mechanisms that comprised the strategy revealed that the strongest crime-prevention gains were generated by situational prevention strategies rather than by misdemeanor arrests or social service strategies.
There is growing interest in crime prevention through early youth interventions; yet, the standard United States response
to the crime problem, particularly among juveniles, has been to increase the use and resource allocation allotted toward punishment
and incapacitation and away from prevention and treatment. At the same time, longitudinal studies of delinquency and crime
have repeatedly documented a strong link between past and future behavior and have identified a small subset of offenders
who commit a large share of criminal offenses. These findings suggest that if these offenders can be identified early and
correctly and provided with prevention and treatment resources early in the life course, their criminal activity may be curtailed.
While researchers have studied these offenders in great detail, little attention has been paid to the costs they exert on
society. This paper provides estimates of the cost of crime imposed on society by high risk youth. Our approach follows and
builds upon the early framework and basic methodology developed by Cohen (J Quant Criminol 14: 5–33, 1998), by using new estimates of the costs of individual crimes, ones that are more comprehensive and that significantly increased
the monetary cost per crime. We also use new estimates on the underlying offending rate for high risk juvenile offenders.
We estimate the present value of saving a 14-year-old high risk juvenile from a life of crime to range from 2.6 to2.6 to 5.3million.
Similarly, saving a high risk youth at birth would save society between 2.6 and2.6 and 4.4million.
Economic theory suggests police and crime are negatively correlated. However, it is surprisingly difficult to demonstrate this relation empirically, as areas with greater numbers of crimes tend to hire more police. In order to resolve this simultaneity, we begin by exploring the structure of the financial relationship existing between state and local governments, arguing that variations in state tax rates can serve as an instrumental variable for local police numbers. Two-stage least square (2SLS) result show that the elasticity of police presence with respect to crime is about −1.1 for violent crime, and −0.9 for property crime. These results are mostly significant, and are more negative than those obtained under OLS. Overall, our estimations suggest that police does reduce crime.
This paper analyzes the link between rising city crime rates and urban flight. Each additional reported crime is associated with a roughly one-person decline in city population. Almost all of the crime-related population decline is attributable to increased out-migration rather than a decrease in new arrivals. Households that leave the city because of crime are much more likely to remain within the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) than those that leave the city for other reasons. Migration decisions of highly educated households and those with children are particularly responsive to changes in crime. Causality appears to run from rising crime rates to city depopulation. © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs as compared to outer London – in fact, police deployment in central London increased by over 30 percent in the six weeks following the July 7 bombings. During this time crime fell significantly in central relative to outer London. Study of the timing of the crime reductions and their magnitude, the types of crime which were more likely to be affected and a series of robustness tests looking at possible biases all make us confident that our research approach identifies a causal impact of police on crime. Implementing an instrumental variable approach shows an elasticity of crime with respect to police of approximately -0.3, so that a 10 percent increase in police activity reduces crime by around 3 percent.
An important challenge in the crime literature is to isolate causal effects of police on crime. Following a terrorist attack on the main Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1994, all Jewish institutions received police protection. Thus, this hideous event induced a geographical allocation of police forces that can be presumed exogenous in a crime regression. Using data on the location of car thefts before and after the attack, we find a large deterrent effect of observable police on crime. The effect is local, with no appreciable impact outside the narrow area in which the police are deployed.
Arguably the most aggressive affirmative action program ever implemented in the United States was a series of court-ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments. My best estimate of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action on work-force composition is a 14-percentage-point gain in the fraction African American among newly hired officers. Evidence on police performance is mixed. Despite substantial black-white test score differences on police department entrance examinations, city crime rates appear unaffected by litigation. However, litigation lowers slightly both arrests per crime and the fraction black among serious arrestees. (JEL H76, J15, J78, K31)
In an inè uential paper in the June 1997 Amer- ican Economic Review, Steven Levitt argues that there is an electoral cycle in police hiring, with faster hiring in election years and slower hiring in other years. He then uses elections as an instrument for police hiring to estimate the causal effect of police on crime. This comment points out that a weighting error in Levitt's estimation procedure led to incorrect inferences for the key results of the paper. Levitt presents a series of regression models explaining changes in crime rates in different cities over time, including ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage least squares (2SLS) spec- ié cations. He draws two main conclusions. First, police substantially reduce violent crime, but have a smaller effect on property crime. Second, 2SLS estimates are consistently more negative than OLS estimates. Levitt's 2SLS results for violent crime are driven by a large, apparently precise estimate of the effect of police on murder. This is surprising since among the seven categories of crime con- sidered, murder exhibits the greatest year-to- year variability. It turns out that the precision of the murder estimate is due to a weighting error. The weighting procedure was designed to give relatively more weight to crimes with lower year-to-year variability. However, an error in Levitt's computer program accomplished ex- actly the opposite, giving highly variable crimes the most weight in the estimation, and severely biasing all standard errors. To demonstrate the substantive implications of this error, I present replication estimates that use the correct (and intended) weighting scheme. When weights are employed correctly, the data support neither of Levitt's main conclu- sions. First, correctly weighted 2SLS estimates show no signié cant effect of police on any of the crime categories under consideration. Pooled 2SLS estimates for violent crime (the estimates that Levitt emphasized in his discussion and that are cited in the literature) are half the published magnitude and statistically indistinguishable from zero. Pooled 2SLS property crime estimates, while more precise when correctly weighted than when not, are also indistinct from zero. Second, 2SLS estimates are sometimes more negative and sometimes more positive than the OLS estimates, and the two are never statisti- cally distinguishable when correctly weighted. The weighting error arose in the attempt to gain eféciency. Since covariates and instruments
Using administrative, longitudinal data on felony arrests in Florida, we exploit the discontinuous increase in the punitiveness of criminal sanctions at 18 to estimate the deterrence effect of incarceration. Our analysis suggests a 2% decline in the log-odds of offending at 18, with standard errors ruling out declines of 11% or more. We interpret these magnitudes using a stochastic dynamic extension of Becker's (1968) model of criminal behavior. Calibrating the model to match key empirical moments, we conclude that deterrence elasticities with respect to sentence lengths are no more negative than -0:13 for young offenders. © Copyright 2017 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
We evaluate Angrist and Krueger (1991) and Bound, Jaeger, and Baker (1995) by constructing reliable confidence regions around the 2SLS and LIML estimators for returns-to-schooling regardless of the quality of the instruments. The results indicate that the returns-to-schooling were between 8 and 25 percent in 1970 and between 4 and 14 percent in 1980. Although the estimates are less accurate than previously thought, most specifications by Angrist and Krueger (1991) are informative for returns-to-schooling. In particular, concern about the reliability of the model with 178 instruments is unfounded despite the low first-stage F-statistic. Finally, we briefly discuss bias-adjustment of estimators and pretesting procedures as solutions to the weak-instrument problem.
We present evidence that the use of police statistics as a source of crime data can seriously bias empirical tests of the model of deterrence. We use data for 21 areas in England and Wales in 2001–8. In addition to police-recorded crime data, we use victim-reported crime data from the British Crime Survey that are unaffected by changes in public reporting of crime and police recording of crime. We find that the estimated effect of the number of police on recorded and victim-reported crime is similar for property crime but different for violent crime. Our findings suggest that higher numbers of police not only reduce crime rates but also increase the share of crime, and in particular violent crime, that finds its way into police statistics. The resulting estimation bias is found to be large.
In recent years, researchers have argued that police actions should be focused on high-risk crime places rather than spread thinly across the urban landscape. This review examines the available evaluation evidence on the effects of concentrating police enforcement efforts on crime hot spots. Five randomized experiments and four nonequivalent control group quasi-experiments were identified. The findings of these evaluations suggest that focused police actions can prevent crime and disorder in crime hot spots. These studies also suggest that focused police actions at specific locations do not necessarily result in crime displacement. Unintended crime prevention benefits were also associated with the hot spots policing programs. Although these evaluations reveal that these programs work in preventing crime, additional research is needed to unravel other important policy-relevant issues such as community reaction to focused police enforcement efforts.
Numerous social indicators turned negative for Blacks in the 1980s and rebounded a decade later. We explore whether crack cocaine explains these patterns. Absent a direct measure, we construct a crack prevalence index using multiple proxies. Our index reproduces spatial and temporal patterns described in ethnographic accounts of the crack epidemic. It explains much of the 1980s rise in Black youth homicide and more moderate increases in adverse birth outcomes. Although our index remains high through the 1990s, crack's deleterious social impact fades. Changes over time in behavior, crack markets, and the user population may have mitigated crack's damaging impacts.
In this article, more general lessons are drawn from two randomized experiments in hot spots policing that the author helped design and implement in the 1990s: the Minneapolis Hot Spots Experiment and the Jersey City Drug Market Analysis Experiment. Using a case study approach, factors that facilitate and inhibit development and implementation of randomized trials are identified with particular focus on the special problems and/or advantages of place-based experiments. While the author's main comments focus on the success of place-based randomized trials in evaluating hot spots policing approaches, he draws insight as well into the reasons why the successful example of experiments in hot spots policing has not inspired similar place-based experimentation in other areas of policing or criminal justice. Eight specific lessons regarding the implementation and development of place-based randomized trials and experimental methods more generally are identified.
We tested the hypothesis that greater enforcement of existing laws against carrying concealed weapons could reduce firearms violence with a quasi-experimental, target beat/comparison beat design. Over a six-month period in a ten-by-eight-block area with a homicide rate 20 times higher than the national average, intensive patrol near gun crime hot spots produced a 65 percent increase in firearms seized by police. Gun crimes declined in the target area by 49 percent, with no significant displacement to any patrol beat surrounding the target area. Neither gun crimes nor guns seized changed significantly in the comparison beat several miles away.
Over the past decade, problem-oriented policing has become a central strategy for policing. In a number of studies, problem-oriented policing has been found to be effective in reducing crime and disorder. However, very little is known about the value of problem-oriented interventions in controlling violent street crime. The National Academy of Sciences' Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior suggests that sustained research on problem-oriented policing initiatives that modify places, routine activities, and situations that promote violence could contribute much to the understanding and control of violence. This study evaluates the effects of problem-oriented policing interventions on urban violent crime problems in Jersey City, New Jersey. Twenty-four high-activity, violent crime places were matched into 12 pairs and one member of each pair was allocated to treatment conditions in a randomized block field experiment. The results of the impact evaluation support the growing body of research that asserts focused police efforts can reduce crime and disorder at problem places without causing crime problems to displace to surrounding areas.
We use aggregate data from 42 police force areas to examine the relationship between economic factors and property crime. The change in unemployment is seen to impact positively on four types of criminal activity examined. A widening of the distribution of weekly earnings of full-time manual men (a measure of wage inequality) and increases in cars per capita (a measure of the availability of thievable property) lead to increases in crime. We also find evidence that increases in the size of the police force reduce property crime.
The past decade has seen a sharp increase in the application of empirical economic approaches to the study of crime and the criminal justice system. Much of this research has emphasized identifying causal impacts, as opposed to correlations. These studies have generally found that increases in police and greater incarceration lead to reduced crime. The death penalty, as currently used in the United States, does not appear to lower crime. We also review the evidence on three other crime-related debates in which economists have played a central role: racial profiling, concealed weapons laws, and the impact of legalized abortion.
In this paper we look at the connection between police resources and crime by focussing on a large-scale policy intervention—the Street Crime Initiative—that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated additional resources to some police force areas to specifically target street crime, whereas other forces did not receive any additional funding. Estimates derived from several empirical strategies show that robberies fell significantly in SCI police forces relative to non-SCI forces after the initiative was introduced. Moreover, the policy seems to have been a cost effective one, even after extensively testing for possible displacement or diffusion effects onto other crimes and into adjacent areas. Overall, we reach the conclusion that increased police resources can be used to generate falls in crime, at least in the context of the SCI program we study. (JEL: H00, H5, K42)
Crime scholars and practitioners have argued that police actions should be focused on high-risk crime places rather than spread thinly across the urban landscape. This review examines five randomized controlled trials of the effects of concentrating police enforcement efforts on crime hot spots. The findings of these evaluations suggest that focused police actions can prevent crime and disorder in crime hot spots. A meta-analysis of the effect sizes from the five experiments reveals a statistically significant mean effect size for hot spots policing interventions; this suggests overall reductions in citizen calls for service in the treatment hot spots relative to the control hot spots. These studies also suggest that focused police actions at specific locations do not necessarily result in crime displacement. Although these evaluations reveal that these programs work in preventing crime, additional research is needed to unravel other important policy-relevant issues such as community reaction to focused police enforcement efforts.
Empirical studies that use reported crime data to evaluate policies for reducing crime will understate the true effectiveness of these policies if crime reporting/recording behavior is also affected by the policies. For instance, when the size of the police force increases, changes in the perceived likelihood that a crime will be solved may lead a higher fraction of victimizations to be reported to the police. In this paper, three data sets are employed to measure the magnitude of this reporting bias. While each of these analyses is subject to individual criticisms, all of the approaches yield similar estimates. Reporting bias appears to be present but relatively small in magnitude: each additional officer is associated with an increase of roughly five Index crimes that previously would have gone unreported. Taking reporting bias into account makes the hiring of additional police substantially more attractive from a cost–benefit perspective but cannot explain the frequent inability of past studies to uncover a systematic negative relationship between the size of the police force and crime rates.
Panel data based studies in econometrics use the analysis of covariance approach to control for various ‘individual effects’ by estimating coefficients from the ‘within’ dimension of the data. Often, however, the results are unsatisfactory, with ‘too low’ and insignificant coefficients. Errors of measurement in the independent variables whose relative importance gets magnified in the within dimension are then blamed for this outcome.Errors-in-variables models have not been used widely, in part because they seem to require extraneous information to be identified. We show how a variety of errors-in-variables models may be identifiable and estimable in panel data without the use of external instruments and apply it to a relatively simple but not uninteresting case: the estimation of ‘labor demand’ relationships, also known as the ‘short-run increasing returns to scale’ puzzle.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 established the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program that provided grants to states and localities to pay up to 75% of the cost for new police hires for 3 years. To date, the COPS program has awarded almost $5 billion in hiring grants paying for 64,000 new police officers. We use annual data from 1990 through 2001 from 2074 cities with populations in excess of 10,000 to show that for each officer paid for by grant funds, the size of the force expands by 0.70 officers. The size of COPS grants are correlated with population and crime rates, but not the pre-COPS time trends in crime rates or the size of the police force. This allows us to use the size of COPS grants as an instrument for the size of the police force in regressions where crime is the outcome of interest. These models indicate that police added to the force by COPS generated statistically significant reductions in auto thefts, burglaries, robberies, and aggravated assaults.
This study uses panel data of intentional homicide and robbery rates for a sample of developed and developing countries for the period 1970–1994, based on information from the United Nations World Crime Surveys, to analyze the determinants of national crime rates both across countries and over time. A simple model of the incentives to commit crimes is proposed, which explicitly considers possible causes of the persistence of crime over time (criminal inertia). A panel-data based GMM methodology is used to estimate a dynamic model of national crime rates. This estimator controls for unobserved country-specific effects, the joint endogeneity of some of the explanatory variables, and the existence of some types of measurement errors afflicting the crime data. The results show that increases in income inequality raise crime rates, crime tends to be counter-cyclical, and criminal inertia is significant.
This paper analyzes the asymptotic power properties of specification tests which are based on a finite set of moment conditions. It shows that any such test may fail against general misspecification that causes estimator inconsistency. The mutual asymptotic equivalence of maximal degree of freedom tests is shown and the form of optimal tests against specific forms of misspecification is derived. Applications to testing for exogeneity of a set of instrumental variables are presented.
This paper estimates the impact of violent crime on the location of business activity and entrepreneurship in five US cities. Central to our analysis is the idea that different sectors of the economy will sort into high- and low-crime areas depending on their relative sensitivity to crime. We illustrate this by comparing retail industries to their wholesale counterparts, and high-end restaurants to low-end eateries. Because retail industries are dependent on pedestrian shoppers, they are expected to be especially sensitive to violent crime. Because high-end restaurants are dependent on evening business, they are expected to be especially sensitive to violent crime over the prime dinner hours. Findings indicate that retail, wholesale, high- and low-end restaurants are all more active in areas with higher local rates of violent crime, even after conditioning on an extensive set of model controls. This could arise because violent crime is attracted to our target industries. This also likely reflects that other sectors of the economy outbid our target industries for safer locations (e.g. residential). Further analysis confirms such sorting behavior. Retailers are more likely to locate in safer locations as compared to wholesalers in the same industry. Among restaurants, an increase in violent crime during the prime dinner hours equivalent to the sample max/min range would decrease the high-end share of local restaurants by roughly 40 percentage points. These findings indicate that entrepreneurs take violent crime into account when bidding for locations within a city. These finding also indicate that efforts to make distressed portions of cities more vibrant must give consideration to the need to ensure that such areas are safe.
I. Introduction Since the turn of the century, legislation in Western countries has expanded rapidly to reverse the brief dominance of laissez faire during the nineteenth century. The state no longer merely protects against violations of person and property through murder, rape, or burglary but also restricts "dis crimination" against certain minorities, collusive business arrangements, "jaywalking," travel, the materials used in construction, and thousands of other activities. The activities restricted not only are numerous but also range widely, affecting persons in very different pursuits and of diverse social backgrounds, education levels, ages, races, etc. Moreover, the likeli hood that an offender will be discovered and convicted and the nature and extent of punishments differ greatly from person to person and activity to activity. Yet, in spite of such diversity, some common properties are shared by practically all legislation, and these properties form the subject matter of this essay. In the first place, obedience to law is not taken for granted, and public and private resources are generally spent in order both to prevent offenses and to apprehend offenders. In the second place, conviction is not generally considered sufficient punishment in itself; additional and sometimes severe punishments are meted out to those convicted. What determines the amount and type of resources and punishments used to enforce a piece of legislation? In particular, why does enforcement differ so greatly among different kinds of legislation?
This paper investigates the effect of economic conditions (carrots) and sanctions (sticks) on murder, assault, robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, grand larceny, and rape in New York City, using monthly time-series data spanning 1974-99. Carrots are measured by the unemployment rate and the real minimum wage; sticks are measured by the number of felony arrests, size of the police force, and number of New York City residents in prison. In addition, the paper tests the validity of the "broken windows" hypothesis. Consistent with its implementation by the New York Police Department, we use misdemeanor arrests as a measure of broken-windows policing. The broken-windows hypothesis has validity in the case of robbery, motor vehicle theft, and grand larceny. While both economic and deterrence variables are important in explaining the decline in crime, the contribution of deterrence measures is larger than those of economic variables.
Despite widespread popular accounts that link crack cocaine to inner-city decay, little systematic research has analyzed how the emergence of crack affected urban crime. We study this question using FBI crime rates for 27 metropolitan areas and two sources of information on when crack first appeared in those cities. Using methods designed to control for unobserved differences among metropolitan areas, we find that the introduction of crack had substantial effects on crime. In the absence of crack cocaine, the 1991 peak in urban crime rates would have been approximately 10% lower, remaining below the previous peak levels of the early 1980s. © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
Previous attempts at estimating the economic model of crime with aggregate data relied heavily on cross-section econometric techniques and, therefore, do not control for unobserved heterogeneity. This is even true of studies that estimated simultaneous equations models. Using a new panel data set of North Carolina counties, the authors exploit both single and simultaneous equations panel data estimators to address two sources of endogeneity: unobserved heterogeneity and conventional simultaneity. Their results suggest that both labor market and criminal justice strategies are important in deterring crime but that the effectiveness of law enforcement incentives has been greatly overstated. Copyright 1994 by MIT Press.
This paper attempts to discriminate between deterrence, incapacitation, and measurement error as explanations for the negative empirical relationship between arrest rates and crime. Measurement error cannot explain the observed patterns in the data. Incapacitation suggests that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will reduce all crime rates; deterrence predicts that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will lead to a rise in other crimes as criminals substitute away from the first crime. Empirically, deterrence appears to be the more important factor, particularly for property crimes. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.
This paper replicates the Cornwell and Trumbull (1994) estimation of a crime model using panel data on 90 counties in North Carolina over the period 1981-1987. While the Between and Within estimates are replicated, the fixed effects 2SLS as well as the 2SLS estimates are not. In fact, the fixed effects 2SLS estimates turn out to be insignificant for all important deterrent variables as well as legal opportunity variables. We argue that the usual Hausman test, based on the difference between fixed effects and random effects, may lead to misleading inference when endogenous variables of the conventional simultaneous equation type are among the regressors. We estimate the model using random effects 2SLS and perform a Hausman test based on the difference between fixed effects 2SLS and random effects 2SLS. We cannot reject the consistency of the random effects 2SLS estimator and this estimator yields plausible and significant estimates of the crime model. This result should be tempered by the legitimacy of the chosen instruments. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This article develops a model of crime in which human capital increases the opportunity cost of crime from foregone work and expected costs associated with incarceration. Older, more intelligent, and more educated adults should commit fewer street (unskilled) crimes. White collar crimes decline less (or increase) with age and education. Predictions for age-crime and education-crime relationships receive broad empirical support in self-report data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and arrest data from the Uniform Crime Reports. The effects of education, training, and wage subsidies, as well as enforcement policies on criminal behavior are discussed. Copyright 2004 by the Economics Department Of The University Of Pennsylvania And Osaka University Institute Of Social And Economic Research Association.
The effect of mismeasured variables in the most straightforward regression analysis with a single regressor variable leads to a least squares estimate that is downward biased in magnitude toward zero. I begin by reviewing classical issues involving mismeasured variables. I then consider three recent developments for mismeasurement econometric models. The first issue involves difficulties in using instrumental variables. A second involves the consistent estimators that have recently been developed for mismeasured nonlinear regression models. Finally, I return to mismeasured left hand side variables, where I will focus on issues in binary choice models and duration models.
paper it was difé cult to draw strong conclusions of the impact of police on crime because of the imprecision of the estimates. McCrary' s new evidence rightly points out that even greater caution is warranted when interpreting the pooled regressions. If electoral cycles can provide no more than suggestive evidence of a causal impact of police on crime, are there other identié cation strategies that can do better? In the pages that follow, I é rst discuss the results of two prior papers of note on the subject. I then present new results using the number of é reé ghters and other mu- nicipal workers as instruments for the number of police ofé cers. All three of these approaches coné rm a large, negative impact of police on crime consistent with those of Levitt (1997), but with estimates much more precise than those attainable using electoral cycles as instruments.
I study a budget-constrained, private-valuation, sealed-bid sequential auction with two incompletely-informed, risk-neutral bidders in which the valuations and income may be non-monotonic functions of a bidder's type. Multiple equilibrium symmetric bidding functions may exist that differ in allocation, efficiency and revenue. The sequence of sale affects the competition for a good and therefore also affects revenue and the prices of each good in a systematic way that depends on the relationship among the valuations and incomes of bidders. The sequence of sale may affect prices and revenue even when the number of bidders is large relative to the number of goods. If a particular good, say [alpha], is allocated to a strong bidder independent of the sequence of sale, then auction revenue and the price of good [alpha] are higher when good [alpha] is sold first.
Economists have generally supposed that certainty and severity of punishment deter crime and have been surprised whenever this is not confirmed by empirical word. This paper gives a number of explanations, consistent with economic theory, as to why there need not be a contradiction here. The empirical work is reviewed with the conclusion that economists have yet to convincingly demonstrate the case for deterrence. In conclusion, a number of potentially fruitful areas for future research within the deterrence paradigm are suggested. Copyright 1988 by WWZ and Helbing & Lichtenhahn Verlag AG