The Difference Between Short and Long Run Effects of Police Outlays on Crime: Policing Deters Criminals Initially, But Later They May 'Learn by Doing'

Abstract . In the long run a positive relationship of police expenditurescrime is derived in models which explain criminal behavior In the short run, however, the statistical results point to the possible deterring effect of police expenditures. A theoretical model is constructed to explain the statistical difference of the short and long run effect of police outlays on crime. As police expenditures increase, crime level diminishes. As time elapses, criminals may adjust to the new level of police effort, improve their performance and at the same level of outlays, increase their criminal activities. This phenomenon could be termed “Criminals’Learning by Doing”. It could explain why, over the long run, the level of crime is positively associated with police expenditures. The empirical analysis examines pooled cross sectional time series of 47 states over the period 1970 to 1980—a total of 517 cases.     

Lethal Police Response as a Crime Deterrent:

A bstract . Since Gary Becker's article on the economics of crime and punishment , economists have explored extensively the possible deterrence effect of standard enforcement variables , not only for their public policy implications but to test the hypothesis that illegitimate behavior is sensitive to measures of risk and reward (loss) as well as social, psychological and cultural forces. Research has been needed on the probability of death to the offender caused by official police action—"lethal response." To measure the criminal reaction to intercity variations in the rate of civilian killings of police in the line of duty, a cross-sectional study of 57 cities was undertaken. Variations in non-homicide violent crime rate were found to be inversely related to variations in the intercity lethal response rate. this suggests the presence of a deterrence effect, a one Sixth of one percent decrease in the rate of non-homicide violent crime being associated with a one percent increase in the lethal response rate.     

Stability of a crime level equilibrium

We consider crime level in an economic market with a supply of potential criminals. These criminals differ in their opportunity cost for committing crime, reflecting differences in the value of foregone opportunities such as performing productive labor. The realized demand is influenced by the expected value for crime, which depends on several socio-economic variables including wealth, police enforcement, and police arrest ability. After determining the equilibria level suggested by our approach, we propose a dynamic setup and study the stability of this system. Two critical enforcement levels are determined. Exceeding the lower enforcement threshold will push crime to stabilize (converge) to an equilibrium level. Correspondingly, exceeding the higher enforcement threshold will collapse the crime market to zero.     

state Lotteries and Crime

A bstract . The impact of having a state lottery on the rate of crime against property in that state is estimated. Arguments in the standard economic model of criminal activity employed here include the unemployment rate, real income per capita, presence of the death penalty in the state as a proxy for general severity of punishment , police officers per capita, the percentage of population between the ages of 5 and 24, and the presence of a state lottery. Because the decision of a state to operate a lottery may correlate with crime rates, a selectivity model was run to extract any bias, but no such bias was found. The analysis used data for the 50 states plus the District of Columbia from 1970 through 1984. The results suggest that presence of a state lottery is associated with a crime rate higher by about 3 percent, an effect both statistically significant and practically important.     

Predicting the geo-temporal variations of crime and disorder

Traditional police boundaries—precincts, patrol districts, etc.—often fail to reflect the true distribution of criminal activity and thus do little to assist in the optimal allocation of police resources. This paper introduces methods for crime incident forecasting by focusing upon geographical areas of concern that transcend traditional policing boundaries. The computerised procedure utilises a geographical crime incidence-scanning algorithm to identify clusters with relatively high levels of crime (hot spots). These clusters provide sufficient data for training artificial neural networks (ANNs) capable of modelling trends within them. The approach to ANN specification and estimation is enhanced by application of a novel and noteworthy approach, the Gamma test (GT).     

Future‐Oriented Gang Members?

A bstract    Two prominent theories of crime ( Wilson and Herrnstein 1985 ; Gottfredson and Hirshi 1990 ) rely heavily on the notion that criminals are impatient or "present-oriented." In brief, the theories posit that present-oriented individuals will be predisposed to crime because the "costs" of crime (e.g., prison time) lag behind crime's benefits. While the theory has intuitive appeal, it remains controversial. This study considers a data set first presented by Levitt and Venkatesh (2000 ) that details a drug-selling gang's activities. In this gang, low-ranking criminals accept low initial wages in the hope of receiving high future remunerations. As demonstrated in the note, this wage structure is exceedingly difficult to reconcile (both theoretically and empirically) with the notion of present-oriented criminals. In sum, the study suggests that present orientation is at best an incomplete and idiosyncratic explanation of the causes of crime.     

Transient Crowding and Crime:

A bstract . The effects on crime rates of the intrusion of large numbers of strangers into an area are investigated. The sensitivity of six different crime types ( murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary , and larceny ) to density of strangers is estimated using a standard model of criminal behavior. The variables which reflect this density are measures of tourists, college students, shoppers from other areas, opportunities to consume alcohol , and the presence of interstate highway exits. The results suggest that an increase in the number of strangers into an area has a positive effect on the crimes of burglary, larceny, and robbery, but very little effect on assault, murder and rape. A significant finding is that "wet" counties have a higher incidence of each crime type than do "dry" counties. From a policy standpoint, officials who support economic growth in urban areas should keep in mind that an increase in the opportunity for illegal activity accompanies such growth and plan accordingly.     

Larceny

A dynamic general equilibrium model of larceny - or property crime - is presented in which both economic conditions and government policies affect the commission calculus. The model provides a behavioral framework that is used to estimate the effects of government policies on the commission of larceny. Calibrating the model using data from cities in Los Angeles County, the impact of a number of government policies and of economic development on larceny are quantified. The simulations show that longer prison sentences and higher conviction rates for criminals are the most effective methods to reduce larceny; subsidizing leisure activities, increasing police expenditures and income transfers have little effect on larceny. Using a game-theoretic optimality criterion, all the policies examined are currently overfunded.     

Competition in law enforcement and capital allocation

This paper studies inter-jurisdictional competition in the fight against crime and its impact on occupational choice and the allocation of capital. In a world where capital is mobile, jurisdictions are inhabited by individuals who choose to become either workers or criminals. Because the return of the two occupations depends on capital, and because investment in capital in a jurisdiction depends on its crime rate, there is a bi-directional relationship between capital investment and crime which may lead to capital concentration. By investing in costly law enforcement, a jurisdiction makes the choice of becoming a criminal less attractive, which in turn reduces the number of criminals and makes its territory more secure. This increased security increases the attractiveness of the jurisdiction for investors and this can eventually translate into more capital being invested. We characterize the Nash equilibria—some entailing a symmetric outcome, others an asymmetric one—and study their efficiency.     

Crime Rates,Clearance Rates and Enforcement Effort: The Case of Houston,Texas*

Abstract . Two time series relationships with respect to police and criminal activities are analyzed. These relationships are: 1. That between police input and police output where the latter was measured by arrest and convictions rates and the former by expenditures and number of officers and, 2. The hypothetical one between the probability of arrest (the clearance ratio; i.e., the proportion of reported crimes for which arrests were made) and crime rates. Theoretically, an increase in expenditures for police effort would cause an increase in the clearance rate and a concomitant reduction in the crime rate. The results of this study showed little or no response in clearance and crime rates to small changes in police expenditures. However, there was evidence that large changes in police effort did produce some response in both clearance and crime rates. The implication of these findings was that the marginal product of police input was small.     

On the observational implications of taste-based discrimination in racial profiling

This paper contributes to a growing literature that attempts to determine whether disparities in police stops and searches of potential criminals of different races stem from taste-based discrimination. The key challenge in making this evaluation is that police officers have more information than the econometrician and thus racial disparities in police behavior may result from these unobservable factors rather than discrimination. We develop a general equilibrium model of police and potential criminal behavior that encompasses key models in the literature. We highlight the assumptions needed for existing methods of detecting racial discrimination to hold. In particular, we show that when there are increasing costs to search, existing tests for discrimination can give incorrect results. Given the potential importance of these costs, we then propose some alternate methods for detecting racial bias in police behavior.     

ETHICAL LIMITATIONS ON CRIMINAL PARTICIPATION

The paper explores the orthodox economic perspective on criminal participation and recognises its theoretical and empirical successes during its relatively short history. Questions are raised, however, over its conceptual underpinnings and its correspondence with reality. Paradoxically, the economics of criminal participation can neither tell us why we have had so much crime in living memory nor why we should not be currently experiencing far more. It assumes 'criminals are (potentially all of) us' and that crime is normal. It is argued that there is a need to bring in the moral dimension directly (without reducing it to a mere price) in order to understand why many agents renounce crime and often sacrifice apparent material advantages by doing the right thing. The economics of crime perspective needs to recognise more fully the role of internal as well as external sanctions impacting on behaviour.     

The Social Provision of Punishment and Incarceration

Standard economic theory proposes that public goods (equally available to everyone) will be underprovided by private markets. Individuals can benefit without having to pay, so there is little incentive to invest or manage resources efficiently. The punishment of criminals is an example of this, since everyone in a society benefits from reduced crime whether they pay to apprehend criminals or not. On that basis, it is widely presumed that governments must provide criminal justice services, including prisons. But the evidence in favor of that view is ambiguous. Stateless societies throughout history have found ways to maintain public order without ever building a prison. Nations with adequate social safety nets and a high degree of equality are also likely to rely on alternatives to incarceration. Strong forms of public goods theory, when applied to punishments and prisons, are shown to be false, since crime control does exist without a centralized state. Furthermore, the available evidence suggests that centralized government provision and management can also suffer inefficiencies from overproduction. Only comparative institutional analysis can speak to the efficiency potentials of punishment, wherein the costs of underproduction are assessed against the likely consequences of overproduction.     

The deterrent impact of police: An examination of a locally provided public service

This paper develops and empirically tests a model of crime deterrence in an urban area. There are two important departures from past efforts to study the impact of criminal sanctions. The first is that the provision of sanctions from the local public sector is modeled; this is accomplished by specifying the distributional goals of local government and by specifying the production of safety. The second departure is that actual crime and reported crime are differentiated theoretically and in the empirical work. An empirical test of the model, using a unique neighborhood data set, shows that police deter crime significantly; however, this deterrent impact cannot be demonstrated without the distinction between actual and reported crime.     

Socioeconomic Conditions and Property Crime:

A comprehensive review of the crime literature indicates varying and often opposing hypotheses of relationships between property crime and socioeconomic conditions such as poverty, business cycle conditions, demographics, criminal justice system actions, and family structure. Employing measures of each of the hypothesized factors, time-series models for robbery, burglary, and vehicle theft are estimated from yearly and national Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data for the period 1959 through 1992 and are used to test these hypotheses' current empirical relevance. The empirical findings selectively confirm the importance of macroeconomic stability and criminal justice system actions in reducing property crime activity. In contrast, decreases in absolute poverty and general income inequality are associated with increased criminal activity; and age demographics and family/community structure apparently have little impact on any of the analyzed property-crime trends, A reduction in inflation apparently decreases property crimes.     

Econom(etr)ics of crime and litigation

Economists approach the behaviour of potential criminals, litigants and law enforcement agencies in terms of rational choice: the actors choose the best alternatives in terms of costs and benefits within the choices open to them. The prime focus of economists is on the general factors in society affecting the crime and litigation level and on the interaction between the crime and litigation level and the legal system. In doing so they have to study the interaction between the micro level of individual decision making and the macro level of the law enforcement system reacting on these decisions. Data are often only available at aggregate (macro) level. Econometric studies at the macro level, especially time series, have the problem that many effects have to be estimated from a limited number of data. Various types of studies and some empirical results regarding crime, litigation and the workload of judicial services are discussed.     

Criminal incident prediction using a point-pattern-based density model

Law enforcement agencies need crime forecasts to support their tactical operations; namely, predicted crime locations for next week based on data from the previous week. Current practice simply assumes that spatial clusters of crimes or “hot spots” observed in the previous week will persist to the next week. This paper introduces a multivariate prediction model for hot spots that relates the features in an area to the predicted occurrence of crimes through the preference structure of criminals. We use a point-pattern-based transition density model for space–time event prediction that relies on criminal preference discovery as observed in the features chosen for past crimes. The resultant model outperforms the current practices, as demonstrated statistically by an application to breaking and entering incidents in Richmond, VA.     

The Economics of the Criminal Behavior of Young Adults

A bstract This study uses a combination of individual-level and county-level data to estimate an economic model of crime for young adults similar to that used by Becker (1968) and Trumbull (1989). In order to estimate a model of crime in which both individual-level and county-level data are used, it is necessary to take account of the bias introduced by using aggregate-level data in conjunction with individual-level data. In order to eliminate this bias, a technique derived by Moulton (1990) is employed. Results from a logit regression model indicate that race, sex. and peer pressure have statistically significant effects on the probability that a young adult will commit a crime. Results also suggest that police presence, as measured by county-level per capita police expenditures, does not deter young adults from committing crimes.     

Bridging “quality” and “quantity” in the study of criminal action

This article summarises the main findings of a study on the narrative construction of deviant actions which focused both on the contents and the structures of the narrative accounts provided by criminals. The research was conducted by collecting narrative interviews. These involved 34 individuals detained in two penal institutions in Rome. These accounts are typically constructed in a non-investigative context. Their exploration is mainly qualitative, but our aim here concern the quantitative sight of qualitative data and viceversa. The project was focused to find if there are any differences in the narrative accounts provided by different offenders, classified according to the type of crime they committed and their experience in the area of deviance. All interviews were analysed using a qualitative data analysis software and taking the “Evaluation model” as a reference. Participants were divided into three groups according to their criminal experience and into four groups according to the crime they committed. The results show that there are important differences in the way a crime is reconstructed by offenders with different criminal history. The paper also proposes solutions and innovative strategies to deal with quantification and qualitative data.     

论注册会计师的反洗钱义务

随着金融系统防范洗钱犯罪措施的加强,注册会计师被犯罪分子利用而卷入洗钱犯罪活动的现象时有出现。本文在对洗钱犯罪利用专业人员新趋势进行分析的基础上,论述了注册会计师承担反洗钱义务的必要性,探讨了注册会计师承担反洗钱义务的困难,提出了注册会计师承担反洗钱义务的解决途径。