Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation

What Can Police Do to Reduce Crime , Disorder , and Fear ?

The authors review research on police effectiveness in reducing crime, disorder, and fear in the context of a typology of innovation in police practices. That typology emphasizes two dimensions: one concerning the diversity of approaches, and the other, the level of focus. The authors find that little evidence supports the standard model of policing—low on both of these dimensions. In contrast,...

Police Patrols and Crime∗

An influential literature has used the aftermath of terrorist attacks to estimate large effects of police street deployment on crime. However, the elasticities obtained in these settings may not easily extrapolate to more standard circumstances. This paper exploits a natural experiment that aimed to increase police presence in more than 6,000 well-defined areas, by economically-realistic amount...

Can Police Prevent Crime?

The Police and Juvenile Crime Police Roles and Responsibilities Police–Juvenile Relations Police Discretion Race as a Factor in Juvenile Arrests Alternatives to Police Arrest and Custody

T first contact that a young juvenile offender has with the juvenile justice system is with a police officer. The nature and circumstances of this police contact are likely to be significant and have a lasting impression on a young person. In this chapter we examine police roles and responsibilities in general, and the unique roles that police have when dealing with juvenile offenders. Children...

Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime: Reply

Justin McCrary (2002) demonstrates that a paper of mine on the subject of elections, police, and crime published in this journal (Levitt, 1997) suffers from programming and classiŽ cation errors. It is with tremendous personal embarrassment that I acknowledge these mistakes, and I thank McCrary for his careful work that has laid bare these errors. While any mistake in published work is unaccept...