Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Cali, the third largest city in Colombia is known for its high crime rates. Homicides for instance, accounts for 56 per 100000 inhabitants for 2016, one of the largest in the world. The local government invests a large proportion of its resources on reducing crime. Even though crime has reduced in the last decade, people´s perception of unsafety is very high. This research focuses on the effects of place-based public policy security interventions on the feeling of safety and the expectations of safety of the Citizens of Cali. Our approach follows a discrete variable that uses survey data collected by the Observatory of public policy (POLIS) in Universidad Icesi. This data collected on 2017, includes sociodemographic characteristics, crime perception, expectations, and changes in the behavior. We use web-scrapping techniques to build a database that accounts for police and government interventions aiming to provide a stronger sense of safety; we are able to establish the timing and location for each intervention and measure proximity to these interventions. Our results show that there is a connection between policy interventions and the sense of safety. Policy interventions are negatively correlated to changes in the behavior aiming to reduce risk exposition.