Crime and Police Resources: The Street Crime Initiative

Stephen Machin () and Olivier Marie ()

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: In this paper we look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to theexisting economics of crime work. To do so we focus on a policy intervention - the StreetCrime Initiative - that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocatedadditional resources to some police force areas to combat street crime, whereas other forcesdid not receive any additional funding. Estimates derived from several empirical strategiesshow that robberies did fall significantly in SCI police forces relative to non-SCI forces afterthe initiative was introduced. Moreover, the policy seems to have been a cost effective one.There is some heterogeneity in this positive net social benefit across different SCI policeforces, suggesting that some police forces may have made better use of the extra resourcesthan others. Overall, we reach the conclusion that increased police resources do in fact leadto lower crime, at least in the context of the SCI programme we study.

Keywords: Street crime; Police resources; Cost effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H00 H5 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law, nep-pbe, nep-reg and nep-ure
Date: 2005-03
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http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0680.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Crime and Police Resources: The Street Crime Initiative (2005)
Working Paper: Crime and Police Resources: The Street Crime Initiative (2005)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0680

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