Do War-On-Gang Declarations Combat Crime? An Interrupted Time-Series Analysis

• In Event: Assessing the Effectiveness of Deterrence-Based Policies

Abstract

Declarations of the government’s determination to combat crime have been employed worldwide as a common public safety strategy. Although such political gestures are intuitively appealing to both the government officials and the public, there is little empirical evidence supporting the crime-deterrent effects of such efforts. According to deterrence theory, it is possible that the declarations deter crime by increasing the objective and perceptive severity and certainty of punishments and reducing would-be offenders’ intention to offend. However, most empirical research on deterrence theory has been focusing on legislative or long-term deterrence strategies rather than non-legislative and short-term strategies. This research fills the gap by measuring the size and duration of deterrent effects of two separate war-on-gang declarations adopted in Taiwan in 2012 and 2014. We performed interrupted time-series analyses to explore the effects of the war-on-gang declarations on Taichung City’s monthly crime rates between 2011 and 2018. The results show that war-on-gang declarations (1) had not led to any significant changes in violence, extortion, gambling, and gun-possession-related crimes, and (2) had shortly increased drug-related crimes, usury, and fraudulence. We conclude that war-on-gang declarations have no deterrence effects on crime rates. Possible reasons attributed to the results are discussed.

Authors

• Li-Chen Chu, SUNY at Albany

• Yi-Syuan Jian, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY