Panic on the Streets of London: Police, Crime and the July 2005 Terror Attacks

By M. Draca, Stephen Machin, Robert Witt. Social Science Research Network, 2011

371 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs as compared to outer London - in fact, police deployment in central London increased by over 30 percent in the six weeks following the July 7 bombings. During this time crime fell significantly in central relative to outer London. Study of the timing of the crime reductions and their magnitude, the types of crime which were more likely to be affected and a series of robustness tests looking at possible biases all make us confident that our research approach identifies a causal impact of police on crime. Implementing an instrumental variable approach shows an elasticity of crime with respect to police approximately -0.3, so that a 10 percent increase in police activity reduces crime by around 3 percent.

Subfields: Modeling and Simulation, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ea467faa8b39909c5e795e1c4aa5baedcc130b2

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Citations in the corpus

Armed Conflict Exposure, Human Capital Investments, And Child Labor: Evidence From Colombia (2012, positive): “8Leading examples of the direct effect of the police force in crime reduction include Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2004), Klick and Taborrak (2005) and Draca et al. (2008) among others.”
Crime Is in the Air: The Contemporaneous Relationship between Air Pollution and Crime (2020, background): “04 of a standard deviation, which is very large and similar to the estimated effect of a 10% increase in police activity (Draca et al. 2011).”
Decriminalizing Indoor Prostitution: Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health (2014, positive): “The freeing up of police personnel and equipment to other areas could ultimately cause other crime rates like rape to decrease (Draca et al., 2011; Adda et al., 2014).”
TESTING ENFORCEMENT STRATEGIES IN THE FIELD: THREAT, MORAL APPEAL AND SOCIAL INFORMATION (2013, background): “We extended this letter along three dimensions: a threat treatment stressed a high detection risk and increased the salience of possible legal and financial sanctions; a moral appeal emphasized that compliance is also a matter of For recent contributions in the context of crime that solve the identi”
Police and thieves in the stadium: measuring the (multiple) effects of football matches on crime (2010, background): “There is a growing literature looking at the police–crime relationship using terrorism-related events since they sometimes induce a surge in police presence in particular locations (Di Tella and Schargrodsky, 2004; Draca et al., 2011).”