The effect of immigration enforcement on crime reporting: Evidence from Dallas

Elisa Jácome

Journal of Urban Economics, 2022, vol. 128, issue C

Abstract: Mistrust between immigrants and the police may undermine law enforcement’s ability to keep communities safe. This paper documents that immigration policies affect an individual’s willingness to report crime. I analyze the 2015 Priority Enforcement Program, which focused immigration enforcement on individuals convicted of serious crimes and shifted resources away from immigration-related offenses. I use data from the Dallas Police Department that include a complainant’s ethnicity to show that the number of violent and property crimes reported to the police by Hispanics increased by 4 percent after the introduction of PEP. These results suggest that reducing enforcement of individuals who do not pose a threat to public safety can potentially improve trust between immigrant communities and the police.

Keywords: Immigration; Crime reporting; Immigration policy; Police effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119021000772
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:juecon:v:128:y:2022:i:c:s0094119021000772

DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2021.103395

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Economics is currently edited by S.S. Rosenthal and W.C. Strange

More articles in Journal of Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().