Was there a Ferguson Effect on crime rates in large U.S. cities?

Pyrooz, David C.; Decker, Scott H.; Wolfe, Scott E.; Shjarback, John A.

doi:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2016.01.001

Cited by 151 publications

(138 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Deadly force by police has been a concern for the American public for many decades (Alpert and Fridell, ; Fyfe, ; Goldkamp, ; Klinger, ) and has come to the forefront again because of several highly publicized civilian deaths (Nix and Wolfe, , ; Pyrooz, Decker, Wolfe, and Shjarback, ; Wolfe and Nix, ). Unfortunately, we do not have a good understanding of police use of deadly force because existing national data reported by the government are flawed.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bird's Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015

Nix

Campbell

Byers

et al. 2017

Criminology & Public Policy

314

303

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Research Summary We analyzed 990 police fatal shootings using data compiled by The Washington Post in 2015. After first providing a basic descriptive analysis of these shootings, we then examined the data for evidence of implicit bias by using multivariate regression models that predict two indicators of threat perception failure: (1) whether the civilian was not attacking the officer(s) or other civilians just before being fatally shot and (2) whether the civilian was unarmed when fatally shot. The results indicated civilians from “other” minority groups were significantly more likely than Whites to have not been attacking the officer(s) or other civilians and that Black civilians were more than twice as likely as White civilians to have been unarmed. Policy Implications We implore the U.S. government to move forward with its publication of a national police use‐of‐force database, including as much information about the officers involved as possible. We further suggest police departments use training programs and community activities to minimize implicit bias among their officers.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bird's Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015

Nix

Campbell

Byers

et al. 2017

Criminology & Public Policy

314

303

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“…The unrotated results are substantively similar.9 For applications of the Arellano-Bond panel model to the relationship between crime rates and rates of police stops, see Fornango (2014, 2017).10 The Pearson's correlation between the current and past values of the homicide rate in our data varies from a minimum of .884 to a maximum of .972.11 Despite the variance around the homicide and arrest rate means, inspection of skewness and kurtosis statistics (not shown) did not necessitate transformation of the variables to induce univariate normality. All results not shown are available from the authors by request.12 Pyrooz et al (2016) compared homicide trends for the 12 months before and 12 months after the Ferguson incident in 81 of the 105 U.S. cities greater than 200,000 in population. They did not find a statistically significant increase in the rates of property, violent, or total crime.…”

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confidence: 99%

Did de‐policing cause the increase in homicide rates?

Rosenfeld

Wallman

2019

Criminology & Public Policy

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Research Summary Widespread protests and demands for accountability in the wake of broadly publicized police killings of unarmed civilians coincided with the marked upturn in homicide levels, especially in large U.S. cities, in 2015. Many observers, including prominent political figures, claimed that de‐policing caused the homicide rate to rise: Fearing increased legal liability and publicity, the police employed less proactive enforcement and made fewer arrests, producing an increase in homicide levels. We use structural equation modeling to estimate the simultaneous relationship between arrest and homicide rates between 2010 and 2015 in 53 large cities. We find no evidence of an effect of arrest rates on city homicide rates for any offense category for any year in this period, including 2015, the year of the spike in homicide levels. Policy Implications The results of our analysis reveal that declining rates of arrest did not produce the rise in homicide levels. But arrests, the chief formal reaction to crime, can play an important supporting role in crime prevention. Ample research findings have demonstrated the effectiveness of proactive policing practices, such as targeted patrol, in reducing crime rates. The success of such tactics depends, in turn, on citizens’ belief that criminal offenders face an appreciable risk of arrest. It is equally important, however, that residents of communities that have experienced unwarranted police violence believe that law enforcement is fairly applied. Lack of trust and confidence in the police militates against crime prevention as a co‐production of police and community and may promote violence as a form of self‐help.

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“…At the time of commencing this analysis, official georeferenced crime data for Guyana were not publicly available, as is commonly the case for the United States [40], for example, and other jurisdictions. To obtain public data on crime, our study needed to adopt a different strategy, even though these were unofficial records.…”

Section: Data On Crime and Its Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Spill Over of Crime from Urban Centers: An Account of the Changing Spatial Distribution of Violent Crime in Guyana

Cummings

Markandey

Das

et al. 2019

IJGI

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As the rate of crime decelerates in the developed world, the opposite phenomenon is being observed in the developing world, including Latin America and the Caribbean. Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean has been concentrated in urban settings, but the expertise for studying crime and providing guidance on policing remain heavily rooted in the developed world. A hindrance to studying crime in the developing world is the difficulty in obtaining official data, allowing for generalizations on where crime is concentrated to persist. This paper tackles two challenges facing crime analysis in the developing world: the availability of data and an examination of whether crime is concentrated in urban settings. We utilized newspaper archival data to study the spatial distribution of crime in Guyana, South America, across the landscape, and in relation to rural indigenous villages. Three spatial analysis tools, hotspot analysis, mean center, and standard deviation ellipse were used to examine the changing distribution of crime across 20 years. Based on 3900 reports of violent crime, our analyses suggest that the center of the gravity of crime changed over the years, spilling over to indigenous peoples' landscapes. An examination of murder, where firearms and bladed weapons were the weapons of choice, suggests that these weapons moved beyond the coastal zone. The movement of weapons away from the coast raises concerns for the security of indigenous peoples and their associated wildlife. Our analysis suggests that policing measures should seek to extend towards Amerindian landscapes, and this is perhaps indicative of Latin American states with demographics similar to Guyana's.For the most part, however, criminologists and crime scientists, most of whom work in developed /Westernized nations, have paid little attention to this problem [3] (although see Shenderovich et al. [6]). Natarajan's [3] observations on the contrasting treatment of crime in the developed versus developing world were contained in a publication among a series that used data from El Salvador [7,8], India [9], Colombia [10], Brazil [11,12], among other developing countries [13,14], and gave attention to crime studies and analysis in developing world settings. While Natarajan's [3] argument is relevant and timely, criminology in the developing world has not been entirely neglected. Scholars, including Appiahene-Gyamfi [15][16][17], Araujo [18], Cummings et al. [19], Pujol-Luz et al. [20], Reuter and O'Regan [21], Scabin et al. [22], Souza et al. [23], Spiegel et al. [24], de Melo et al. [25], and Valente [26], have examined various aspects of crime in the developing world. In Amazonia, in particular, the struggle over access to natural resources and the resulting tensions that develop from logging, gold mining, cattle farming, and similar activities tend to dominate the discussion around crime [22]. Beyond simply mapping the cases of deforestation and degradation due to illegal activities, however, there is a growing body of literature aimed at managing ...

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Was there a Ferguson Effect on crime rates in large U.S. cities?

Cited by 151 publications

References 17 publications

A Bird's Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015

A Bird's Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015

Did de‐policing cause the increase in homicide rates?

The Spill Over of Crime from Urban Centers: An Account of the Changing Spatial Distribution of Violent Crime in Guyana

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