More COPS, Less Crime

More COPS, Less Crime Steven MelloPrinceton UniversityIndustrial Relations SectionSimpson International BuildingPrinceton, NJ 25, 2018 AbstractI exploit a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of police on Crime . The AmericanRecovery and Reinvestment Act increased funding for the Community Oriented PolicingServices (COPS) hiring grant program from less than$20 million over 2005-2008 to$1 billion in2009. Hiring grants distributed in 2009 were allocated according to an application score cutoffrule, and I leverage quasi-random variation in grant receipt by comparing the change overtime in police and crimes for cities above and below the threshold in a difference in differencesframework. Relative to low-scoring cities, those above the cutoff experience increases in policeof about and declines in victimization cost-weighted Crime of about following thedistribution of hiring grants. The effects are driven by large and statistically significant effects ofpolice on robbery, larceny, and auto theft, with suggestive evidence that police reduce murdersas well.

Beginning with Levitt (1997), researchers have tried to overcome endogeneity issues in estimating the police-crime relationship by relying on quasi-experimental research designs. Two strands of research comprise the bulk of the quasi-experimental literature. The first uses city level panel data and instru-

Loading..

Tags:

  Data, Panels, Panel data, Endogeneity

Information

Related search queries