Trust in Local Police

That is from a new working paper by Corbacho, Philipp, & Ruiz-Vega (August 2012) which concludes:

Our results show that victims of crime are less likely to trust the local police. The probability of trusting the local police is roughly 10 percent lower among victims, a significant reduction from already low levels of trust in the local police in the region [Latin America]. The results are robust to the inclusion of additional control variables, to matching, and to moderate hidden biases. Our results further show that the impact of victimization on trust in the judiciary and trust in social and business networks are marginal at best.

The authors also report that crime is perceived as a more important problem than unemployment in Latin America.  

HT: Maximo Rossi. 

Institutional change or how to improve the police

Institutions in developing countries, particularly those inherited from the colonial period, are often thought to be subject to strong inertia. This study presents the results of a unique randomized trial testing whether these institutions can be reformed through incremental administrative change. The police department of the state of Rajasthan, India collaborated with researchers at US and Indian universities to design and implement four interventions to improve police performance and the public’s perception of the police in 162 police stations (covering over one-fifth of the State’s police stations and personnel): (1) placing community observers in police stations; (2) a freeze on transfers of police staff; (3) in‐service training to update skills; and (4) weekly duty rotation with a guaranteed day off per week. These reforms were evaluated using data collected through two rounds of surveys including police interviews, decoy visits to police stations, and a large-scale public opinion and crime victimization survey—the first of its kind in India. 

That is the abstract of the new paper "Can Institutions Be Reformed from Within? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment with the Rajasthan Police" by Banerjee et al (2012). 

The results suggest that two of the interventions, the freeze on transfers and the training, were effective in improving police effectiveness and public image. Both increased the reported satisfaction of crime victims with the police investigation, and the freeze on transfers also decreased the number of respondents who report fearing the police. Interestingly, the visits of decoy surveyors pretending to register crimes at police stations, which were initially conceived of primarily as a method of data collection, also had an effect of their own on police behavior-- suggesting that a simple increase in monitoring may have a positive effect on police performance. The other reforms showed no robust effects. 

. . . Why, then, were some interventions implemented and others not? A common thread of the three interventions that were actually implemented is that they were “top-down,” and required little cooperation from the ground staff: transfers must be approved at police headquarters (although there is considerable pressure from outside for some transfers), and training orders were dispatched from above. The decoy visits were performed by an independent company supervised by J-PAL. In contrast, the two unsuccessful interventions required effort and cooperation from the station chiefs (and, in the case of the community observers, participation at the community level).

These results could be implemented in other countries . . .

Police and Crime Against Firms in Developing Economies

[O]ne standard deviation increase in the police force per 100,000 of population decreases losses due to crime by 0.029 standard deviations. We find that this negative relationship between police size and crime losses is stronger (more negative) in big cities, countries with high voter turnouts, high inequality, and firms that are owned and managed by a female than males.

That is the conclusion of a new "Police and Crime Against Firms in Developing Economies" by Islam, Asif. HT: Mark Lee. 
What happens when the police is involved with criminal organizations? The authors controlled for quality of government, which might partially take care of that concern. 

What can high-crime countries learn from the New York Police Department

From the interesting article "The State of the NYPD" by Judith Miller:

Speaking to 100 supporters and guests of the Police Foundation at its annual fund-raising breakfast at the Regency Hotel in midtown Manhattan, Kelly said that a key to the department’s success has been technological innovation—much of it financed by donations from the 40-year-old private organization. The commissioner highlighted two new and promising programs: “vapor wake” dogs, Labrador retrievers trained to detect airborne particles trailing behind someone who has been around explosives; and a new body scanner, still in development, that can detect a concealed weapon on people without frisking them. Not unlike body scanners at some major airports, the NYPD’s gun scanner is the result of a collaboration launched three years ago with the Pentagon’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office. But so far, Commissioner Kelly added, the device works only at short range—up to three or four feet away. His goal is accuracy at a minimum distance of some 75 feet. Eventually, the department hopes to mount the fairly large devices, now about the size of a large flat-screen TV, on NYPD vans to scan an entire area.

A good image brings donations

The New York City Police Foundation, established in 1971 to provide police vests and other innovations that even this well-funded police department cannot always afford, has invested over $100 million in such programs since its creation, said Valerie Salembier, the foundation chairwoman and publisher of Town and Country who is close to Commissioner Kelly and his wife, Veronica. The foundation’s donors, in general, constitute a veritable Who’s Who of New York’s entrepreneurs and philanthropists, making it a “destination” charity for the socially mobile. But it has institutional backers, too: in 2010, JPMorgan Chase donated $4.75 million in cash, technology, and other resources to the foundation, the largest gift in the foundation’s history.

The results

In their remarks Tuesday, both Kelly and Salembier stressed the vital role such contributions play for the NYPD, which allocates 92 percent of its $4.6 billion annual budget to salaries and benefits. The NYPD, with its 35,000 uniformed officers and total of 50,000 employees, depends on private and corporate giving to sustain the technological edge that has helped it reduce crime to record-low levels—down some 34 percent since 2001 in a city that has grown by 1 million people since 1990. There were 504 murders last year in the city (down 6 percent from 2010’s total of 534), meaning that only six New Yorkers were killed per 100,000 people. Compare that with New Orleans, where 61 out of 100,000 were killed, or 15 per 100,000 in Chicago, or 24 per 100,000 in Philadelphia.

The importance of technology

Foundation funds have also helped the department detect and disrupt 14 separate terrorism plots targeting New York since 9/11, two of these in 2011, Kelly said. For several years, the foundation has helped finance most of the NYPD’s $1.5-million-a-year International Liaison Program, in which 11 NYPD detectives are embedded in police departments overseas to explore potential New York ramifications of terrorist activity abroad. The foundation provided $300,000 in seed money for the department’s Real Time Crime Center, whose database now contains 800,000 mug shots and whose vehicle data helped the city recover over 1,200 stolen cars last year alone. The foundation has helped finance the city’s network of 2,000 (eventually 3,000) sophisticated security cameras, which feed information into a central monitoring system to detect suspicious or unlawful activity. Eventually, data collected from the department’s chemical, biological, and radiation detectors will also be fed into the system. A new police academy now under construction, also partly financed by the foundation, will be the nation’s most high-tech police-training facility, Kelly says.

Foundations and the police 

But as federal and state funds for law enforcement shrink, the need for private foundation support seems likely only to grow. Police foundations modeled on New York’s have already been created in New Orleans, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and other cities are considering them as well. And donations in New York are strong and growing, foundation spokesmen say.

What can the police in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Central America learn from the NYPD?

1. Technology is key.
2. Public funding is not sufficient. 
3. Foundations are critical to increase funding.
4. Much more transparency is necessary to gain credibility.