Police Disruption and Performance: Evidence from Recurrent Redeployments within a City

Giovanni Mastrobuoni

No 8799, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: More policing reduces crime but little is known about the mechanism. Does policing deter crime by reducing its attractiveness, or because it leads to additional arrests of recurrent criminals? This paper provides evidence of a direct link between policing and arrests. During shift changes a peculiar redeployment of police patrols belonging to separate police forces disrupts policing and lowers the likelihood of clearing robberies with an arrest by 30 percent. There is no evidence that criminals exploit these dips in police performance. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that incapacitation explains 2/3 of the elasticity between robberies and policing.

Keywords: deployment; arrests; deterrence; incapacitation; crime; police; quasi-experiment; shift changes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H00 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - publilshed in: Journal of Public Economics, 2019, 176, 18-31

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8799.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Police disruption and performance: Evidence from recurrent redeployments within a city (2019)
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:iza:izadps:dp8799

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().