Community monitoring and crime: Evidence from Chicago's Safe Passage Program

This paper investigates the effect of community-based monitoring on crime in the context of a school safety initiative that employed community members to monitor city blocks during students' travel to and from school. Although we find that total crime decreased by 17% relative to neighboring non-treated blocks, these main effects are not the complete story. We find evidence of treatment spillovers in blocks closest to treated areas, but we also uncover cross-crime substitution within treated blocks, intertemporal reallocation of crime to non-monitored periods, and spatial displacement of crime into areas farther away from treated blocks. Our estimates of the benefit-cost ratio associated with each additional civilian-year of community monitoring are much larger than traditional estimates of each additional police officer-year.

Duke Scholars

Author Sarah Komisarow Sanford School of Public Policy