Panel Paper:
Policing and Crime
Friday, November 4, 2016
:
8:30 AM
Embassy (Washington Hilton)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
In this paper we estimate the effects on crime from increased policing spending by studying the 2009 competition for police hiring grants carried out by the US Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office. The question is important for understanding whether current levels of spending on police in the US are optimal. Our study takes advantage of the fact that the COPS office had substantial excess demand for grant funding in 2009, receiving $8 billion worth of requests for the $1 billion in grant funding available. Applications were scored using a formula that weighted together crime, financial distress, and other local conditions, and then essentially rank-ordered and funded based on this score. This creates a regression discontinuity (RD) design that, we show, increased police spending per capita in the short term by 0.8 percent in jurisdictions with scores near the funding threshold, which remained at 0.7 percent several years later. We show that this discontinuity in police spending translated into a decline in total Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) part 1 offenses equal to between 1.1 and 1.8 percent, a decline in part 1 violent crimes equal to between 2.4 and 3.1 percent, and a decline in part 1 property crimes equal to 1.2 and 2 percent.
