Hot Spots, Patrolling Intensity, and Robberies: Lessons from a three-year program in Uruguay
José María Cabrera,
Alejandro Cid () and
Federico Veneri
MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Abstract:
We study the effects of increasing police presence on crime by exploiting the quasi-experimental nature of a large-scale hot spots intervention in a Latin American country that had experienced a significant increase in crime over the last 30 years. We match geocoded data on crime and GPS data that signals the presence of police to 200x200 meters cells covering Montevideo, Uruguay. Employing a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, our results suggest that the program effectively increased police presence in the designated areas and reduced crime. We found an overall elasticity of 0.47 - a 10% increase in police presence is associated with a decrease of 4.7% in robberies. This three-year intervention allows us to investigate heterogeneous effects by year of intervention and contexts. The program presented greater effects during the first year of the intervention; during 2017, a period associated with significant legal changes in the country's criminal policy, the program did not affect crime. In 2018, we observed positive results in police presence and crime reduction but at a reduced level. We associated this reduction in outcomes with program fatigue which could impact the sustainability of this type of intervention. This study may help policymakers identify the conditions under which hot spots policing programs work and the degree to which they are replicable and scalable.
Keywords: Crime; Robberies; Police; Patrolling; Hot spots; Georeferenced; GPS; Difference-in-differences; Uruguay; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J48 K42 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam, nep-law and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/113786/1/MPRA_paper_113786.pdf original version (application/pdf)
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:pra:mprapa:113786
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().