A Picture Worth a Thousand Words: The Effect of Murals on Crime

• In Event: Improving Public Safety Through Lighting, Street Cleaning, and Murals

Abstract

Place-based interventions, rooted in social disorganization theory, have proven not only effective in countering crime but also relatively inexpensive, including street lighting, lot greening, and vacant housing abatement. The installation of large exterior murals fits well within this framework as an affordable intervention that transforms communities and can positively impact crime rates. In Philadelphia, the staggered implementation of the Mural Arts program’s murals lends itself to a difference-in-differences quasi-experimental design that exploits spatial and temporal variability. Using this method, I uncover a significant decrease in several crime categories in the 30 months after painting begins, with the largest significant effects found for disorder crimes (a reduction of up to 50%) and smaller but significant effects identified for total, Part 1, violent, and property crime. The bulk of the effect is found for streets with repeated murals in a 30-month rather than 13-month window, pointing to longer-term neighborhood transformations that improve with repeated treatment. I also detect crime spillovers and explore heterogeneity by placement type, pointing to public spaces as the most effective venue for murals and schools as the least. To address the limitations of this retrospective setting, a randomized control trial of mural installation is currently in development in the neighboring city of Chester, Pennsylvania. This forthcoming study tests the potential for murals to reduce an ongoing issue of gun violence and will allow enhanced mechanism testing.

Author

• Maya Moritz, University of Pennsylvania