Community Policing and Alcohol-Involved Crime

20世纪90年代社区警务计划的兴起增加了当地执法部门旨在减少犯罪的社区外展工作，包括每年300多万起与酒精有关的犯罪，估计每年产生840亿美元的成本。虽然社区警务活动已变得普遍，但人们对这些活动如何影响酗酒犯罪知之甚少。该项目将使用美国众多司法管辖区日常犯罪事件的详细数据，研究社区警务活动与酒精犯罪之间的关系。分析将解决以下问题：1）社区警务活动是否减少了酒后驾车、酗酒犯罪或其他类型的犯罪？2)这些事件减少犯罪的效果能持续多久？3)社区警务活动的影响是否因社区或执法机构的特点而异？4)通过有效的社区警务活动避免犯罪的成本是多少？ 虽然从理论上讲，加强警察与社区的接触似乎有可能使警察能够更有效地预防和调查犯罪，但现存的几项试图将社区警务与犯罪联系起来的实证研究所采用的研究设计使得很难清楚地衡量社区警务活动的因果影响。此外，尽管社区警务活动往往包括旨在减少药物滥用的组成部分，但关于社区警务影响的工作一直侧重于暴力犯罪和第一类犯罪，很少关注与酒精或毒品有关的犯罪。 本研究旨在通过使用高频数据来衡量社区警务活动的影响，这些数据专门识别与酒精和毒品有关的犯罪和家庭暴力事件。它利用了国家夜间活动（NNO）计划产生的变化，该计划每年在同一天在数千个社区实施社区警务活动。NNO在德克萨斯州举行的日期与美国其他州不同，提供了一个使用差异研究设计来衡量社区警务活动影响的机会。除了对社区警务的效果提供更可信的经验估计外，这项研究还将表明社区警务活动在某些类型的社区或在处理特定类型的犯罪方面是否更有效。 这项研究将使决策者、警察局长和公众更好地了解执法机构的具体社区外联活动是否以及如何通过减少与酒精有关的犯罪和暴力来加强公共卫生。它还将使利益攸关方能够更好地计算社区警务活动的投资回报。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The rise in community policing programs during the 1990s has increased community outreach efforts by local law enforcement aiming to reduce crime, including the more than 3 million annual alcohol-related crimes that generate an estimated $84 billion in annual costs. Although community policing activities have become widespread, little is known about how such activities affect alcohol-involved crime. This project will use detailed data on daily crime incidents across numerous U.S. jurisdictions to examine the relationship between community policing activities and alcohol-involved crime. The analysis will address the following questions: 1) Do community policing events reduce DUI, alcohol-involved crime, or other types of crime? 2) How long do the crime reducing effects of these events last? 3) Does the impact of community policing events vary according to the characteristics of the community or law enforcement agency? 4) What are the costs of crime avoided by effective community policing events? Although theoretically it seems plausible that enhanced police-community engagement might allow police to more effectively prevent and investigate crime, the few extant empirical studies that attempt to link community policing and crime employ research designs that make it difficult to cleanly measure the causal effects of community policing activities. Moreover, despite the fact that community policing activities often include components designed to reduce substance misuse, work on the effects of community policing has focused on violent and Part I crime, with little attention given to alcohol or drug-related crime. This stdy seeks to measure the impacts of community policing activities by employing high-frequency data that specifically identifies incidents of alcohol and drug-related crime and domestic violence. It exploits variation arising from the National Night Out (NNO) program, which implements community policing activities across thousands of communities each year on the same date. NNO is held on a different date in Texas than in other U.S. states, furnishing an opportunity to measure the effects of community policing events using a differences-in-differences research design. In addition to providing more credible empirical estimates of the effects of community policing, the study will demonstrate whether community policing activities are more effective in certain types of communities or at addressing particular types of crime. This research will allow policymakers, police chiefs, and the public to better understand whether and how specific community outreach activities of law enforcement agencies can enhance public health by reducing alcohol-involved crime and violence. It will also allow stakeholders to better calculate the return on investment from community policing events.