The Effect of 311 Calls for Service on Crime in D.C. at Micro Places

• In Event: Environmental Approaches to Crime Prevention and Intervention

Abstract

Broken windows theory has been both confirmed and refuted with several different measures of physical disorder. Small experiments tend to confirm the priming effects of physical disorder on minor deviant acts, but measures based on order maintenance policing and surveys are much more mixed. Here I use 311 calls for service as a proxy for physical disorder and estimate the effects on crime at street segments and intersections in Washington, D.C.

I show that 311 calls for service based on detritus (e.g. garbage on the street) and infrastructure complaints (e.g. potholes in sidewalks) both have a positive but very small effect on Part 1 crimes under many different model specifications. I also critically discuss model specifications of street units nested within neighborhoods, and show that crime counts do not conform to fixed neighborhood boundaries. In this example such specifications introduce artificial negative auto-correlation at the boundaries of neighborhoods in the model residuals, and I show how using spatial correlograms can identify the differences between a continuous spatial model and a neighborhood effects type model.

Author

• Andrew Palmer Wheeler, University at Albany, SUNY