How changing law enforcement capabilities influences rates of stealing crimes.pdf (original) (raw)

Crimes phenomenon is a very complex one that was investigated by many studies and explained by many theories. Several factors that may play a role in the spread of crimes in certain communities were also identified. However, there can be more factors to discover. In this paper, we look at the potential effects of some demographic, social, economic and law enforcement factors. Specifically, we focus on the effects of law enforcement capabilities since they are still underestimated and almost ignored by researchers. In this econometric study, we tried to find out how the change in law enforcement capabilities affects the rates of stealing crimes in US communities. The counterintuitive results we found showed how complex this relation is. For example, we found that increasing police numbers per population is correlated with a very small decrease in the rates of stealing crimes. Even more interesting, we found that increasing police operating budgets per population is correlated with an increase in stealing crimes rates. These results were discussed and some reasonable explanations were given. We believe this study is valuable for policy makers and for criminology researchers alike.

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