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CRIME PREVENTION

CRIME PREVENTION-POLICING-CRIME REDUCTION-POLITICS

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The Cost of Parking: A Preliminary Analysis of Parking Tickets Data in Austin, Minneapolis, and Portland 

By  Livia Mucciolo, Fay Walker, and Aravind Boddupalli 

State and local officials are starting to consider the disproportionate effects of criminal legal fines and fees on the lives of families with low incomes—especially Black, Latine, and Native American families. Although policymakers have focused mostly on court and prison fees, most individuals may interact with the criminal legal system via parking tickets, which if left unpaid can turn into lifelong financial burdens. Parking tickets serve as a way to streamline city services like plowing, accessibility to fire hydrants, and street cleaning, but research and news investigations show they can also especially harm people of color and those with low incomes (Brazil 2018). 1 Parking tickets (also called “tickets”) refer to citations issued by police officers or other government traffic officials to inactive motor vehicles for violations of local laws. In this research brief, we analyze three aspects of parking tickets: locations in cities where tickets are issued, the number and dollar amount of tickets assessed, and the types of violations for which tickets are assessed. We look at tickets between January 2018 to December 2019, and we focus on three large cities: Austin, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Portland, Oregon. We selected these cities because of their accessible data and because they were not among the prominent places studied in fines and fees literature so far. Our analysis shows a majority of parking tickets were issued in downtown areas, which typically have a higher density of office buildings, shops, and restaurants. This likely corresponds to the higher concentration of parking meters installed and monitored in commercial corridors. Overall, the largest contributors to parking tickets by type included expired or missing meter receipts and failure to display registration and parking in no-parking and tow-away zones. Because of data limitations, we could not determine the demographic composition of those ticketed. 

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2023. 26p.

Following the Money on Fines and Fees The Misaligned Fiscal Incentives in Speeding Tickets

By Aravind Boddupalli and Livia Mucciolo

State and local governments collected $16 billion in fiscal year 2019 from financial penalties imposed on people who had contact with the justice system, according to US Census Bureau data. These penalties included speeding tickets (including those from automated traffic cameras), parking tickets, court-imposed administrative fees, and forfeitures or seizures of property believed by law enforcement officials to be connected to crimes.1 In total, fines, fees, and forfeitures account for less than 1 percent of total state and local general revenue, but the way they are enforced can create unjust burdens. These financial penalties often disproportionately fall on low-income people of color, particularly Black people (O’Neill, Kennedy, and Harris 2021; Sances and You 2017). In addition, consequences for those unable to pay can be severe (Menendez et al. 2019). Reliance on fines, fees, and forfeitures as a revenue source can also engender conflicts of interest for government officials. For example, states and localities have ramped up speeding ticket enforcement and arrests for various violations in response to budgetary shortfalls and political pressures (Makowsky, Stratmann, and Tabarrok 2019). In this report, we first examine how much states and localities report collecting from fines, fees, and forfeitures, highlighting the states and localities most reliant on them as a revenue source. While the average state and local share of revenue from fines, fees, and forfeitures is relatively small, these shares are larger for some local governments, especially small cities. We then explore how revenue from some fines and fees (we exclude forfeitures from this analysis) are allocated in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and a handful of cities. We specifically focus on speeding tickets as an illustrative example. Overall, we find that in at least 43 states, some portion of speeding ticket revenue is allocated toward a court or law enforcement fund. This finding reveals the potential for conflicts of interest and misaligned fiscal incentives. That is, police officers and judges might levy fines and fees with the intent of funding their respective agencies, as was demonstrated by the 2015 US Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson, Missouri’s police department (US Department of Justice 2015). We additionally find that many states use fines and fees to fund general government services unrelated to cost recovery for the justice system, such as special funds for health care or highway initiatives.

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2022. 39p.

A race against time: Europol – Basel Institute on Governance recommendations on preventing and combating the criminal use of cryptocurrencies

By EUROPOL and the Basil Institute of Governance

These recommendations follow the 7th Global Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptocurrencies on 26–27 October 2023. The conference was co-organised by Europol and the Basel Institute on Governance and took place in hybrid format at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands. The Recommendations highlight broad approaches and best practices to prevent and combat the use of crypto assets and services to make, hide and launder illicit money. The five recommendations highlight the need for accelerated action in order to combat the use of crypto assets, as well the allocation of more resources, better training and better collaboration.

They are to:

Accelerate innovation for investigative and monitoring tools

Boost enforcement capacity and training

Reorganise to foster collaboration and prioritisation

Engage proactively in multi-sector collaborations

Consider the whole chain, from prevention to facilitators

Basel, SWIT: Basel Institute of Governance, 2024. 7p.

Improving Misdemeanor Enforcement Strategies for Building Public Safety and Addressing Racial Disparities in New York City 

By Josephine Wonsun Hahn, Ram Subramanian, and Tiffany Sanabia  

  Low-level offenses, especially misdemeanors, constitute a majority of the nation’s criminal dockets, including in New York City. A Brennan Center report examining minor offense enforcement trends finds that the city’s minor offense system has shrunk since 2010. But enforcement still falls hardest on communities that have high proportions of people of color and experience elevated levels of poverty. Minor offense criminal justice reform has so far not made a dent in the troubling racial disparities in cases across the city.  Brennan Center researchers interviewed police, prosecutors, court officials, city government officials, criminal justice advocacy organizations, community-based service providers, and community leaders — people who contribute to public safety efforts in neighborhoods most impacted by minor offense enforcement — to better understand what may be driving interactions with the city’s minor offense criminal justice system and perpetuating racial disparities. Study participants, as well as previous research, point to particular drivers often referred to as social determinants of justice: social disadvantages such as poverty, housing instability, poor mental health, and substance use; poor conditions and a lack of resources in the most impacted communities; and the criminal justice system’s persistent inability to address social problems and community needs. While recent increases in public disorder in New York City may invite simplified punitive responses that expand enforcement, such responses are unlikely to fundamentally change the conditions under which minor offenses — including those related to nuisance and disorder — grow. No strong empirical evidence exists demonstrating the effectiveness of punitive enforcement in either changing disorderly behavior or reducing crime. In particular, one 2019 meta-analysis contradicts the assumed causal connection between disorder and crime; another finds that aggressive order-maintenance enforcement that targets individual disorderly behaviors does not significantly reduce crime, whereas community and problem-solving approaches do. Such approaches involve people in the community to help identify problems and solutions — and can include non–criminal justice responses, such as referrals to community-based service providers. In any event, a punitive-only approach  also comes at too high a financial and human cost. Minor criminal offenses, most of which do not result in a jail sentence, can cause people to lose their jobs and homes, become unemployable, or be burdened with unpayable fines and fees. These compounding burdens make it even harder for people already struggling to exit the revolving door of the criminal justice system.5 Promising strategies already exist in New York City to address root causes of crime and disorder via programs with targeted interventions and resources within communities with high numbers of minor offense cases. These mostly small-scale experiments provide examples of the choices the city can make to help prevent crime while also reducing the cycle of criminal justice system involvement that helps fuel racial disparities. New York City can build on these strategies and programs to both shrink overly punitive responses and address some of the drivers of criminalized behavior in precincts with high caseloads. Although the programs and practices discussed below are based in New York City, many will be relevant to policymakers across the country. Some cities, counties, and states have adopted similar practices that divert people charged with minor offenses — many of whom face substance use, trauma, and mental health problems — from the justice system. Like New York City, other jurisdictions are looking to community-based strategies for solutions outside the criminal justice system. However, these innovations remain limited in scale and scope. Rules governing eligibility shut too many people out, often focusing on only a narrow slice of the population charged with minor offenses — typically a small subset of youth, people with mental illness, people who use drugs, people arrested and charged for the first time, or people arrested and charged with nonviolent offenses.6 There also may be structural limitations based on geography, funding, or capacity. To achieve a smaller, more responsive system that better addresses underlying needs and racial disparities, state and local policymakers, with support from nonprofit organizations and private philanthropy, should consider a range of effective strategies that target communities with elevated minor offense enforcement — neighborhoods in New York City that are home to predominantly Black and Latino populations. These starting steps include: ƒ scaling up successful diversion programs; ƒ building crisis response systems to address mental health and substance use; ƒ expanding supportive housing programs; and ƒ investing in crime-prevention models in which law enforcement, residents, city agencies, and others work together to build public safety and address community needs    

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2024. 17p.

Designing Out Crime from Products and Systems

May Contain Mark-Ups

Designing Out Crime from Products and Systems Edited by Ronald V. Clarke & Graeme R. Newman

The book “Designing Out Crime from Products and Systems,” edited by Ronald V. Clarke and Graeme R. Newman, provides a comprehensive overview of how effective design can significantly reduce crime. It explores various successful initiatives from around the world, focusing on modifying products and systems to make them less susceptible to criminal exploitation. The book covers a wide range of topics, including the role of government and the corporate sector in crime prevention, the fundamentals of crime-proofing design, and specific case studies such as the U.K. vehicle licensing system and the security coding of electronic products. By analyzing these examples, the editors highlight the importance of incorporating crime prevention into the design process from the outset, rather than relying on reactive measures. One of the key themes of the book is the concept of“situational crime prevention,” which involves altering the environment or the design of products to reduce opportunities for crime. The editors argue that many crimes can be prevented by making relatively simple changes to the design of everyday objects and systems. For instance, the book discusses how the introduction of tamper-proof packaging for pharmaceuticals significantly reduced incidents of product tampering. It also emphasizes the need for collaboration between designers, manufacturers, and policymakers to create products that are both functional and secure. Overall, the book serves as a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding how design can be used as a tool for crime prevention

Criminal Justice Press, 2005, 265 pages