This week, we are moving back to the topic of scaling in cities, and we are looking specifically at the question, why do larger cities tend to have more crime than smaller cities?
Did you see this paper by Glaeser? The idea of higher returns and lower risks of being caught make sense to me. It's older now, but could have a useful trail to more recent work.
What I find interesting about this is that law enforcement should scale better in cities as well. You can patrol the same number of houses in a smaller amount of time, use fewer cameras, have more witnesses, etc.
So naively you would expect the scale effects in crime and in law enforcement to cancel out. But it doesn't, I wonder why.
That's a good point. I suspect that there is a crime-reducing effect from efficiencies in law enforcement, but that it simply is of a smaller magnitude than the crime-increasing effects.
Yeah, obviously there are hotspots. To what extent certain areas concentrate crime, as opposed to creating crime, is an interesting question. I've certainly seen instances where cities amp up law enforcement in some neighborhoods, only to see commensurate increases of crime in other neighborhoods.
Did you see this paper by Glaeser? The idea of higher returns and lower risks of being caught make sense to me. It's older now, but could have a useful trail to more recent work.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/250109
Matthew Kahn has his paper about heat and policing:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w25961
I believe there's some discussion of crime in Kahn's industrial economies/cities book too.
Yeah, I did see the Glaeser paper, though I didn't have time to review it carefully. I hadn't seen the other one. Thanks for pointing them out.
What I find interesting about this is that law enforcement should scale better in cities as well. You can patrol the same number of houses in a smaller amount of time, use fewer cameras, have more witnesses, etc.
So naively you would expect the scale effects in crime and in law enforcement to cancel out. But it doesn't, I wonder why.
That's a good point. I suspect that there is a crime-reducing effect from efficiencies in law enforcement, but that it simply is of a smaller magnitude than the crime-increasing effects.
Do we think there are concentrated areas of crime within cities? And would that affect the scaling or interpretation of the studies here?
Seems possible that there are more effective policing in some corners than others?
I really don't know anything about this literature or policy area. But it doesn't seem like averages for cities matter as much as for neighborhoods.
https://x.com/clancy4utah/status/1900607919684809189?s=46&t=ZMns3D_jZL6ktgyoEuo4YA
Yeah, obviously there are hotspots. To what extent certain areas concentrate crime, as opposed to creating crime, is an interesting question. I've certainly seen instances where cities amp up law enforcement in some neighborhoods, only to see commensurate increases of crime in other neighborhoods.
@Cameron Murray @The Emergent City