Reassessing 'The Effect of the Seattle Police-Free CHOP Zone on Crime': A counteracting critique

• In Event: Theory-testing and relevant methodologies in criminological research

Abstract

Piza & Connealy (2022) use a microsynthetic control approach to estimate the effect of a 24-day withdrawal of Seattle Police Department (SPD) from a section of the city following extended protests and clashes with law enforcement. They conclude this withdrawal resulted in a significant increase in crime and interpret this as strong evidence that police abolition would compromise public safety. Using counterfactuals and a graphical causal model, we demonstrate that their study does not answer the stated key question: whether levels of crime would have been lower had SPD not withdrawn. Rather, Piza & Connealy instead estimated how much crime increased due to a compound treatment consisting of both the large-scale protest against police and the resultant withdrawal of law enforcement that was conducted with the intent to de-escalate protest-related conflict. The resulting estimates thus do not provide an estimate of the effect of a police withdrawal on local crime rates. We discuss the implications of this analysis for researching the effect of police deployments on crime rates.

Author

• Charles C Lanfear, University of Cambridge