Order Maintenance in Crime Hot Spots: The Effects of Local Police Surges on Stops and Crime in New York City

• In Event: Proactive Policing in New York: Social and Legal Impacts of Two Decades of Stop and Frisk

Abstract

The sustained crime decline of two decades in New York City has challenged researchers and policymakers to accurately identify of the unique contribution of Order Maintenance Policing (OMP), the dominant policing model in the city throughout this period. Two distinct strategies have informed OMP in New York. Under the legal umbrella of Terry v Ohio, police in New York conduct hundreds of thousands of proactive street stops (“stop, question and frisk”) of citizens each year when police suspect that “crime is afoot.” The second component is a spatial focus on “hot spots” policing, a strategy that has generated extensive and rigorous empirical support as a method to reduce crime and disorder. The design of hot spots policing in New York since 2003 has been through the implementation of approximately 30 Impact Zones, small areas where crime has spiked and that police saturate with additional patrol officers to intensify stop and frisk activity. Impact Zones are created, manned and ended based on crime trends, and accordingly have distinct selection criteria. Prior research estimating the effect of Impact Zones has been limited by data restrictions to analyses of their larger impact on surrounding police precincts. Accordingly, current unpublished estimates of policing effects are imprecise. This paper exploits the timing and geographic implementation of Impact Zones to identify the effects OMP on proactive street stops and crime. We use a regression-discontinuity design that estimates the effects of OMP on outcomes by using the timing and location of these zones relative to their nearest neighboring areas. Dynamic selection is modeled and analyses are weighted for selection propensity. We also assess police efficiency – or “hit rates” – in Impact Zones relative neighboring areas to further assess their alleged public safety benefits.

Authors

• John MacDonald, University of Pennsylvania

• Jeffrey Fagan, Columbia Law School