Evidence that curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime

Christopher M. Sullivan () and Zachary P. O’Keeffe
Additional contact information
Christopher M. Sullivan: Louisiana State University
Zachary P. O’Keeffe: University of Michigan

Nature Human Behaviour, 2017, vol. 1, issue 10, 730-737

Abstract: Abstract Governments employ police to prevent criminal acts. But it remains in dispute whether high rates of police stops, criminal summonses and aggressive low-level arrests reduce serious crime 1–7 . Police officers target their efforts at areas where crime is anticipated and/or where they expect enforcement will be most effective. Simultaneously, citizens decide to comply with the law or commit crime partly on the basis of police deployment and enforcement strategies. In other words, policing and crime are endogenous to unobservable strategic interaction, which frustrates causal analysis. Here, we resolve these challenges and present evidence that proactive policing—which involves systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations—is positively related to reports of major crime. We examine a political shock that caused the New York Police Department (NYPD) to effectively halt proactive policing in late 2014 and early 2015. Analysing several years of unique data obtained from the NYPD, we find that civilian complaints of major crimes (such as burglary, felony assault and grand larceny) decreased during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing. The results challenge prevailing scholarship as well as conventional wisdom on authority and legal compliance, as they imply that aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:nathum:v:1:y:2017:i:10:d:10.1038_s41562-017-0211-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0211-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().