IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunwpe/0779.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Impact of the First Professional Police Forces on Crime

Author

Listed:
  • Bindler, Anna

    () (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Hjalmarsson, Randi

    () (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

Abstract

This paper evaluates how the introduction of professional police forces affected crime using two natural experiments in history: the 1829 formation of the London Metropolitan Police (the first police force ever tasked with deterring crime) and the 1839 to 1856 county roll-out of forces in England and Wales. The London Met analysis relies on two complementary data sources. The first, trial data with geocoded crime locations, allows for a difference-indifferences estimation that finds a significant and persistent reduction in robbery but not homicide or burglary. A pre-post analysis of the second source, daily police reports of both cleared and uncleared crime incidents, finds a significant reduction in all violent crimes but offsetting changes in uncleared (decrease) and cleared (increase) property crimes. These (local) reductions in crime are not just due to crime displacement but represent true decreases in overall crime. Difference-in-difference analyses of the county roll-out find that only sufficiently large forces, measured by the population to force ratio, significantly reduced crime. The results are robust to controlling for spill-over effects of neighboring forces.

Suggested Citation

  • Bindler, Anna & Hjalmarsson, Randi, 2019. "The Impact of the First Professional Police Forces on Crime," Working Papers in Economics 779, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0779
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/62225
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Heblich, Stephan & Redding, Stephen J. & Sturm, Daniel M, 2018. "The Making of the Modern Metropolis: Evidence from London," CEPR Discussion Papers 13170, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Mirko Draca & Stephen Machin & Robert Witt, 2011. "Panic on the Streets of London: Police, Crime, and the July 2005 Terror Attacks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(5), pages 2157-2181, August.
    3. Timothy Besley & Torsten Persson, 2009. "The Origins of State Capacity: Property Rights, Taxation, and Politics," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(4), pages 1218-1244, September.
    4. Gary S. Becker, 1974. "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach," NBER Chapters, in: Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment, pages 1-54, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Paul Heaton & Priscillia Hunt & John MacDonald & Jessica Saunders, 2016. "The Short- and Long-Run Effects of Private Law Enforcement: Evidence from University Police," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 59(4), pages 889-912.
    6. Anna Bindler & Randi Hjalmarsson, 2020. "The Persistence of the Criminal Justice Gender Gap: Evidence from 200 Years of Judicial Decisions," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 63(2), pages 297-339.
    7. Klick, Jonathan & Tabarrok, Alexander, 2005. "Using Terror Alert Levels to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 48(1), pages 267-279, April.
    8. Kasey Buckles & Melanie Guldi & Joseph Price, 2011. "Changing the Price of Marriage: Evidence from Blood Test Requirements," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 46(3), pages 539-567.
    9. Mehlum, Halvor & Miguel, Edward & Torvik, Ragnar, 2006. "Poverty and crime in 19th century Germany," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 370-388, May.
    10. John M. MacDonald & Jonathan Klick & Ben Grunwald, 2016. "The effect of private police on crime: evidence from a geographic regression discontinuity design," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 179(3), pages 831-846, June.
    11. Wong, Yue-Chim Richard, 1995. "An Economic Analysis of the Crime Rate in England and Wales, 1857-92," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 62(246), pages 235-246, May.
    12. Mara P. Squicciarini & Nico Voigtländer, 2015. "Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 130(4), pages 1825-1883.
    13. Vincent Bignon & Eve Caroli & Roberto Galbiati, 2017. "Stealing to Survive? Crime and Income Shocks in Nineteenth Century France," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 127(599), pages 19-49, February.
    14. Aaron Chalfin & Justin McCrary, 2017. "Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 55(1), pages 5-48, March.
    15. repec:oup:alecon:v:18:y:2016:i:2:p:385-437. is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Rafael Di Tella & Ernesto Schargrodsky, 2004. "Do Police Reduce Crime? Estimates Using the Allocation of Police Forces After a Terrorist Attack," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(1), pages 115-133, March.
    17. Levitt, Steven D, 1997. "Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(3), pages 270-290, June.
    18. Andrea Cann Chandrasekher, 2016. "The Effect of Police Slowdowns on Crime," American Law and Economics Review, Oxford University Press, vol. 18(2), pages 385-437.
    19. Cameron, Samuel, 1988. "The Economics of Crime Deterrence: A Survey of Theory and Evidence," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(2), pages 301-323.
    20. Wolpin, Kenneth I, 1978. "An Economic Analysis of Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1894-1967," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(5), pages 815-840, October.
    21. Jordi Blanes i Vidal & Tom Kirchmaier, 2018. "The Effect of Police Response Time on Crime Clearance Rates," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 85(2), pages 855-891.
    22. Daniel S. Nagin, 2013. "Deterrence: A Review of the Evidence by a Criminologist for Economists," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 5(1), pages 83-105, May.
    23. Anna Bindler & Randi Hjalmarsson, 2018. "How Punishment Severity Affects Jury Verdicts: Evidence from Two Natural Experiments," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 10(4), pages 36-78, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Blesse, Sebastian & Diegmann, André, 2019. "Police reorganization and crime: Evidence from police station closures," ZEW Discussion Papers 18-044, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    police; crime; deterrence; economic history; institutions;

    JEL classification:

    • H00 - Public Economics - - General - - - General
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law
    • N93 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: Pre-1913

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0779. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Ann-Christin Räätäri Nyström). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/naiguse.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.