Crime Displacement Research Articles

Association of Involuntary Displacement of People Experiencing Homelessness and Crime in Denver, CO: A Spatiotemporal Analysis.

In 2022, approximately 580,000 people experienced homelessness in the United States. In response, many cities have implemented "camping ban" policies enforced by involuntary displacement of homeless encampments. Displacement has been cited as a strategy to protect public health and safety. However, there is mixed evidence that displacement is effective in reducing crime, while it is associated with other adverse health outcomes. To evaluate the neighborhood-level association between displacement and crime, we performed a retrospective (November 2019 to July 2023) pre-post spatiotemporal analysis using administrative data from Denver, CO. We used the Knox test statistic to detect excess clustering and change in total crime, as well as crime stratified by the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) category, within spatiotemporal proximity to displacement events. We found that, on average, clustering of crime is high both before and after displacement. Within a 0.25-mile radius, displacement is associated with a statistically significant but modest decrease in crime, between - 9.3% within 7days (p < 0.001) and - 3.9% within 21days (p = 0.002). We found no consistent change in composite crime at a 0.5- or 0.75-mile radius. Hyperlocal decreases were driven by significant decreases in public disorder and auto theft, while crimes against persons increased and displayed high clustering post-displacement. There were no changes in any other offense type. Involuntary displacement is not consistently associated with changes in clustering of crime and may exacerbate violence in nearby areas.

A review of the impacts of Business Improvement Districts on crime and disorder

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are an initiative adopted by some local governments, businesses, and residents to address concerns around crime and disorder in commercial areas, especially open street town centres. BIDs have become popular in the USA since the 1970s; however, no comprehensive review of evaluations has occurred to date. This paper systematically reviewed the academic literature to find 13 BID evaluations. These studies were examined in terms of their impacts on crime and disorder, displacement, and cost-effectiveness. Of the nine studies that quantitatively examined BID impacts on crime rates, eight (88%) found a reduction in one or more crime types. Six studies explored BID impacts on property crime, with all finding BIDs had a significant negative association with at least one type of property crime, with BIDs particularly effective at targeting vehicle-related offences. BIDs were also found to have a positive impact on reducing disorder and public nuisance type offences, however, had mixed evidence on violent crime, with three out of seven studies on violent crime finding BIDs can help to prevent robbery. Displacement of crime to surrounding areas was found to be rare, and the three studies that examined costs of operating BIDs all concluded they are cost-effective. The challenges of implementing BIDs are discussed, along with the implications for ongoing policy and practice development in the reduction of crime and disorder in commercial areas.

Remote Viewership of International Sporting Events and Crime: Evidence From Jamaica

This article examines the effect of televised international sporting events (e.g., FIFA World Cup or Summer Olympics) on crime in Jamaica. We use a fixed effects model that compares, within each police division, the level of crime that occurs during these international sporting events to the rate of crime on similar days when these events are not occurring. We found that on days when the FIFA World Cup matches are held, there is a reduction in the number of murders (23.3%), shootings (20%), break-ins (19.4%), and robberies (11.7%), relative to the average number of each incident. We found no evidence of crime displacement, as these crimes also reduced during nonmatch periods during the FIFA World Cup. On the other hand, our results suggest that the international events that are less popular in Jamaica (the World Athletics Championship, the Summer Olympics, and the Winter Olympics) had a minimal impact on crime.

Do hotspot policing interventions against optimal foragers cause crime displacement?

Optimal forager theory (OFT) initially emerged from ecological studies, elucidating how foraging organisms seek resources. In recent decades, this ecological theory has migrated to the realm of criminology, where it is used to identify burglary offenders and inform crime analysis. Several police services employ optimal forager theory-based analysis to guide hotspot patrol interventions aimed at reducing domestic burglary. Crime displacement resulting from hotspot interventions has been a subject of debate, with approximately a quarter of cases experiencing some form of displacement, the underlying reasons for which remain unclear. This study postulates that the presence of the optimal forager typology of offender may be one contributing factor. To test this hypothesis, we analyze the cumulative crime diffusion and displacement effects of ten optimal forager theory-inspired hotspot interventions employing the weighted displacement quotient (WDQ) technique (Bowers and Johnson, 2003) and the Cambridge harm index (CHI) (Sherman et al., 2016). The findings reveal the interventions' marked efficacy in reducing domestic burglary within response areas. However, this reduction is overshadowed by the substantial spatial and offense displacement they induce, encompassing both crime count and harm. These results provide insights into the proportion of hotspot interventions that trigger crime displacement, and policy implications for the choice and selection of crime reduction strategies. Supported by ecological studies of optimal foragers, we argue that this phenomenon stems from the exceptional motivation of foraging offenders and their inclination toward anti-detection behavior, specifically, relocating to alternative crime areas.

Asymmetric crime dynamics in and out of lockdowns

Abstract This article studies the dynamic impact of a temporary policy restricting social encounters due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on criminal activity in Bihar, India. Using a regression discontinuity design in time and criminal case—level and arrest data, I document an immediate drop in crime of over 35% due to the lockdown. Analysis over a longer timespan shows asymmetric dynamics by crime type. The lockdown was more effective in preventing personal crimes such as murders but was less effective in preventing property crimes, which increased beyond pre-lockdown levels once the lockdown was lifted. The increase in property crimes seems to be driven by temporal crime displacement from “former offenders” and not by “new offenders.” These asymmetric dynamics across crime types provide new insights into criminals’ intertemporal decisions (JEL K14, K42).

Are Dollar Stores Magnets for Violent Crime? Evidence from Chicago

With the rise of economic inequality in recent decades, dollar stores have flourished in the United States. Although the media has increasingly portrayed dollar stores as violent crime magnets, limited academic research has examined their impact on nearby crime. This study employed a difference-in-differences approach to investigate the impact of dollar stores on localized violent crime patterns in Chicago. Results showed a significant increase in violent crimes, especially robberies, in nearby areas relative to the control areas, following the opening of dollar stores. There were no signs of spatial crime displacement. Moreover, after the closing of dollar stores, the levels of violent crime in nearby areas relative to the control areas returned to those of the prestore opening period, regardless of the type of crime. This study also explored how the impact of dollar store openings on nearby crime rates evolves over time and varies according to the surrounding context of the store's location.

Effects of Internal Forced Displacement on Crime: Evidence from Colombia

Internal forced displacement, a consequence of territorial control strategies by armed groups, has resulted in profound socioeconomic challenges for receiving areas. Approximately eight million people have been affected in Colombia, where internal conflict and criminal networks have prevailed for over five decades. This paper explores the relationship between internal forced migration and crime rates in Colombian municipalities from 2003 to 2016, focusing on spatial dynamics. The study utilizes a spatial panel model and considers five crime categories: homicides, kidnapping, personal injuries, automobile theft, and residential burglary. The results reveal significant associations between forced displacement and certain types of crime, highlighting the importance of spatial analysis in understanding the interaction between migration and crime. The findings offer valuable insights for policymakers and researchers, facilitating informed policy interventions and community initiatives to address the repercussions of internal migration on crime dynamics.

The Ripple Effects of Compliance: Reconfiguring EU Policy Effectiveness in Transboundary Environmental Governance

AbstractResearch on EU policy effectiveness focuses on implementation and compliance within the EU; however, there is a need for a greater understanding of how and why transboundary socio‐ecological issues challenge policy effectiveness beyond the EU's borders. This article introduces the innovative concept of ‘ripple effects’ of compliance, which are harms perpetuated by structural inequalities, and discusses their implications for EU environmental governance. Contributing to transnational compliance research by integrating political ecology and green criminology, the analysis builds on qualitative data on the illegal bird trade from the Western Balkans into the EU. It demonstrates that compliance with conservation policies within Member States undermines EU policy objectives through crime displacement and institutional misfit, which externalise environmental harm to the Western Balkans. Increased enforcement and monitoring of policy implementation alone cannot function as a panacea for policy ineffectiveness. Addressing these dynamics requires strengthened multilevel and cross‐jurisdictional governance that encompasses entire ecosystems.

Hot spots policing as part of a city-wide violent crime reduction strategy: Initial evidence from Dallas

A growing body of literature suggests that crime is both concentrated in a small number of geographic units, and committed by a small number of people, within American cities. A related body of empirical evidence, dating back almost three decades, suggests that police can effectively combat violent crime in hot spots by focusing resources within them. The current study evaluates the impact of a hot spots policing strategy in Dallas, Texas as part of a comprehensive, city-wide strategic plan to reduce violent crime. Using difference-in-differences techniques, we find consistent evidence that violent crime fell, on average, by 11% in targeted hot spots during the first year of the Dallas Crime Plan with no evidence of spatial crime displacement to adjacent areas. Effects varied somewhat by treatment type. The offender-focused treatment was somewhat more effective than the high visibility treatment alone, but both reduced crime by statistically significant amounts. Arrest analyses likewise revealed differential impacts by treatment type, with significant arrest reductions seen in high visibility treatment areas consistent with deterrence and arrest increases in offender-focused areas consistent with the strategy's focus on violent offenders. The contribution of the targeted hot spots to city-wide violent crime decreased significantly over the course of the year, which provides inferential evidence of the strategy's possible city-wide impact on violent crime. Implications of the study for policy, practice, and future research are discussed.

Construction and Analysis of Space–Time Paths for Moving Polygon Objects Based on Time Geography: A Case Study of Crime Events in the City of London

Time geography considers that the motion of moving objects can be expressed using space–time paths. The existing time geography methods construct space-time paths using discrete trajectory points of a moving point object to characterize its motion patterns. However, these methods are not suitable for moving polygon objects distributed by point sets. In this study, we took a type of crime event as the moving object and extracted its representative point at each moment, using the median center to downscale the polygon objects distributed by the point sets into point objects with timestamps. On this basis, space–time paths were generated by connecting the representative points at adjacent moments to extend the application scope of space–time paths, representing the motion feature from point objects to polygon objects. For the case of the City of London, we constructed a space–time path containing 13 nodes for each crime type (n = 14). Then, each edge of the space–time paths was considered as a monthly vector, which was analyzed statistically from two dimensions of direction and norm, respectively. The results showed that crime events mainly shifted to the east and west, and crime displacement was the greatest in April. Therefore, space–time paths as proposed in this study can characterize spatiotemporal trends of polygon objects (e.g., crime events) distributed by point sets, and police can achieve improved success by implementing targeted crime prevention measures according to the spatiotemporal characteristics of different crime types.

Property crime and the China trade shock

ABSTRACT Burglary has declined markedly in the U.S.A. We investigate whether increased imports from China (the China Trade Shock), by reducing the market value of theft-worthy goods, reduced the incentive to commit this and other property crimes. Panel data models reveal lower property crime rates in association with increased Chinese imports and comparable effects in relation to other prominent trade partners, indicating minimal property crime displacement effects. Some import effects do link to increased violent crime rates, but none in relation to imports from China. The results illustrate how expanded trade provides social benefits in addition to its well-established economic benefits.

Moving Up or Moving Out? Examining Gentrification and the Spatial Displacement of Crime

One unexamined aspect in gentrification and crime research is whether perceived crime declines in gentrifying neighborhoods are due to the displacement of crime into nearby areas. Using an innovative measure of gentrification, we examine whether Los Angeles neighborhoods identified as having gentrified between 2000 and 2018 experienced differential change in crime relative to neighborhoods that did not gentrify; and whether gentrification in spatially proximate neighborhoods influenced crime in the focal neighborhood, a sign of displacement. We found neighborhoods surrounded by gentrified neighborhoods saw an increase in property, but not violent, crime. The impact of spatial gentrification was not contingent on change in crime in the focal, suggesting the impacts of gentrification are spatially diffuse, but do not necessarily displace crime.

Assessing the Impact of Ferry Transit on Urban Crime

In 2017, over a dozen ferry stations were introduced across the NYC region on multiple dates, serving roughly 10,000 customers per day. We measure a negative association between these stations and crime reduction, a significant decline of 11 crimes per week (11%) at a one-mile radius around the stations, and about 1 crime per week (32%) over the extremely narrow base of crime at the station itself. We also find no evidence of crime displacement. This study first utilized a traditional difference-in-differences methodology, but we also used a new tool, the causal random forest. Both methodologies are compared and contrasted with an eye toward user understanding. The results of our analysis are consistent and coherent across all the different methodologies, with the causal random forest finding more pronounced effects by taking into account two major factors: the propensity of the regions for treatment, and the interaction between elements of interest.

Learning from perpetrator replacement to remove crime opportunities and prevent poaching of the Sundarbans tiger.

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is one of the leading causes of the decline in high-value species. Crime-reduction strategies to counter IWT can have unintended effects, with crime displacement occurring when offenders react to such interventions. Despite the value of understanding how and why displacement occurs for informing conservation strategies, few examples are published. We explored a case of perpetrator replacement following an intervention and drew lessons for conservation strategies for high-value species. Poaching and subsequent trade threaten the Sundarbans tiger (Panthera tigris). Pirate gangs were the dominant poachers from 1980 to 2017, but following an extensive campaign, the Sundarbans was declared pirate free in 2018. We interviewed 280 individuals, including 100 tiger poachers, from 26 administrative unions bordering the Sundarbans and used interviewee responses to compare the poaching situation during and after the pirate era. We analyzed the spatial distribution of tiger poachers among the unions and used crime script analysis of the dominant poacher type to identify intervention. Because pirates opportunistically poached tigers, the government's successful counter-pirate campaign inadvertently removed the dominant tiger poaching type. However, a temporary reduction in poaching was rapidly cancelled out by the emergence of at least 32 specialist tiger-poaching teams. With the risk of extortion and robbery from pirates gone, other groups increased the frequency of opportunistic and targeted tiger poaching. Based on expert interviews, we estimated that 341 tiger poachers of all types are active throughout the unions, with 79% of specialists concentrated in 27% of unions. The highly focused counter-pirate campaign reduced motivations and opportunities for piracy but left intact the opportunity structure and trade connections for tiger poaching, and with insufficient enforcement officers trading has flourished. Interventions targeting opportunities for poaching by specialist tiger poachers include heightened surveillance and reporting mechanisms and alternative livelihood provision to disincentivize poaching.

Crime Analysis of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile: A Spatial Panel Data Approach

The aim of our work is to determine the influence that socio-economic and demographic factors have had on crimes that have taken place during the period 2010–2018 in the communes of the Metropolitan Region of Chile, as well as the existence of possible spatial or temporal effects. We address 12 kinds of crime that we have grouped into two main types: against people and against property. Our interest focuses on crimes against people, using crimes against property as an additional covariate in order to investigate the existence of the broken-windows phenomenon in this context. The model chosen for our analysis is a spatial panel model with fixed effects. The results highlight that covariates such as infant mortality, birth rate, poverty and green areas have a significant influence on crimes against people. Regarding the spatio-temporal covariates, one effect observed is that there is a displacement of crime towards neighbouring communes, leaving open a new line of study to discover the causes of this displacement.

Knowledge Development Trajectories of Crime Prevention Domain: An Academic Study Based on Citation and Main Path Analysis.

This study performed main path analysis to explore the academic field of crime prevention. Studies were collected from the Web of Science database, and main path analysis was used to analyze the studies and identify influential authors and journals on the basis of the g-index and h-index. Cluster analysis was then performed to group studies with related themes. Wordle was used to output keywords and word clouds for each cluster, both of which were used as reference to name each cluster. Five clusters were identified, namely crime displacement control, crime prevention through environmental design, developmental crime prevention, the effects of communalism on crime prevention, and the effect of childhood sexual abuse on crime. Each cluster was analyzed, and suggestions based on the results are provided. The main purpose of crime prevention is to advance our understanding of the psychological criminal mechanisms (i.e., personal, social and environmental impacts) associated with different criminal behaviors at the intersection of law by using main path analysis.

Impact evaluation of the LAPD community safety partnership

In 2011, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), in conjunction with other governmental and nonprofit groups, launched the Community Safety Partnership (CSP) in several public housing developments in Los Angeles. Following a relationship-based policing model, officers were assigned to work collaboratively with community members to reduce crime and build trust. However, evaluating the causal impact of this policy intervention is difficult, given the notable differences between communities where CSP was implemented and the surrounding communities in South Los Angeles. In this paper we use a novel data set, based on the LAPD’s reported crime incidents and calls-for-service, to evaluate the effectiveness of this program via augmented synthetic control models, a cutting-edge method for policy evaluation. We perform falsification analyses to evaluate the robustness of the results. In the public housing developments where it was first deployed, we find that CSP exhibited modest but statistically insignificant reductions in reported violent crime incidents, shots fired and violent crime calls-for-service, and Part I reported crime incidents. We do not find evidence of crime displacement from CSP regions to neighboring control regions.

Crime-time: how ambient light affects crime

AbstractThis paper studies the effect of sunlight on crime, taking advantage of a daylight saving time (DST) policy. We find a 30% decrease in robberies when the DST transition increases the amount of sunlight by 1 h during the 7–9 p.m. period. We document a symmetric reaction when DST decreases sunlight exposure. We complement these findings by showing that the response induced by DST is not associated with a plausible demand-side response such as the population’s commuting patterns and we find no substantial short-term displacement of crime. Our results show that ambient light is a key driver of criminal activity in urban spaces.

Potential for informal guardianship in community-based wildlife crime prevention: Insights from Vietnam

The notion that indigenous people and local communities can effectively prevent conservation crime rests upon the assumption that they are informal guardians of natural resources. Although informal guardianship is a concept typically applied to “traditional” crimes, urban contexts, and the global North, it has great potential to be combined with formal guardianship (such as ranger patrols) to better protect wildlife, incentivize community participation in conservation, and address the limitations of formal enforcement in the global South. Proactive crime prevention is especially important for illegal snare hunting, a practice that has led to pernicious defaunation and which has proved difficult to control due to its broad scope. This paper uses interview data with community members in protected areas in Viet Nam where illegal snare hunting is commonplace to 1) analyze the conditions for informal guardianship in the study locations; 2) explore how community members can become more effective informal guardians; and 3) examine how formal and informal guardianship mechanisms can be linked to maximize deterrence and limit displacement of illegal snaring. Results indicate that conditions for informal guardianship exist but that respondent willingness to intervene depends upon the location, offender activity, and type of offender (outsider versus community member). While respondents generated numerous strategies for wildlife crime prevention, they also listed crime displacement mechanism offenders used to avoid detection. We discuss how informal guardianship can be integrated with formal guardianship into an overall model of situational crime prevention to protect wildlife and incentivize community-led deterrence of illegal snaring.

Absence of Street Lighting May Prevent Vehicle Crime, but Spatial and Temporal Displacement Remains a Concern

Absence of Street Lighting May Prevent Vehicle Crime, but Spatial and Temporal Displacement Remains a Concern