Impact Evaluation of the LAPD Community Safety Partnership

Abstract

In 2011, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), in conjunction with other governmental and nonprofit groups, launched the Community Safety Partnership (CSP). Through this community policing program, officers are assigned to work alongside community members in Los Angeles public housing developments to reduce crime by building relationships and trust within these communities. In this paper, we use LAPD reported crime incidents and calls for service data to evaluate the effectiveness of this program via augmented synthetic control models. Extensive falsification analyses are provided to evaluate the robustness of the results. CSP is shown to have reduced both reported violent crime incidents as well as shots fired and violent crime calls starting roughly three years post CSP-implementation. We do not find evidence of crime displacement from CSP regions to neighboring control regions.

Date
Location
virtual