By Magdalena Domínguez

Worldwide, gang proliferation is fought mostly with tough punishment strategies such as sweeps. In this paper, I study their causal effect on crime for arrested individuals and known peers following a difference-in-differences strategy. I also take advantage of the network structure I retrieved to assess peer effects and identify key players. I perform such an analysis with novel administrative data from the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, where Latin gangs expanded rapidly and where a stark policy change occurred. Results show significant reductions in crimes of arrested individuals and their peers, particularly in crimes against the person. The areas of the sweeps benefit from improvements in crime, health and education. I further conduct an innovative counterfactual policy exercise comparing sweep outcomes with theoretically predicted crime reductions when removing key players. This exercise indicates that sweeps could have achieved a 50% larger reduction in criminal activity had key players been removed. In this way, a network analysis provides insights on how to improve policy design.

IEB Working Paper 2021/03. University of Barcelona, Institute of Economics, 2021. 55p.

By Radley Balko

The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other—an enemy.

Today’s armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit—which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Nixon’s War on Drugs, Reagan’s War on Poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, the post–9/11 security state under Bush and Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations expanded and empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. And these are just four among a slew of reckless programs.

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  In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.Description text goes here

New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. 400p.

By Daniel Meji and Pascual Restrepo

This paper develops a simple model of the war against illegal drugs in producer and consumer countries. Our analysis shows how the equilibrium quantity of illegal drugs, as well as their price, depends on key parameters of the model, among them the price elasticity of demand, and the effectiveness of the resources allocated to enforcement and prevention and treatment policies. Importantly, this paper studies the trade-off faced by drug consumer country`s government between prevention policies (aimed at reducing the demand for illegal drugs) and enforcement policies (aimed at reducing the production and trafficking of illegal drugs in producer countries). We use available data for the war against cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia, and that against consumption in the U.S. in order to calibrate the unobservable parameters of the model. Among these are the effectiveness of prevention and treatment policies in reducing the demand for cocaine; the relative effectiveness of interdiction efforts at reducing the amount of cocaine reaching consumer countries; and the cost of illegal drug production and trafficking activities in producer countries.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE, 2011. 31p.

By Keith Guzik.

“Mexico’s Federal Police Intelligence Center (CIPF) was inaugurated on November 24, 2009… The CIPF, a subterranean structure colloquially known as El Bunker, serves as the command center for the federal government’s War on Crime… El Bunker features four video walls, each measuring 65 by 10 feet, displaying eighty rear-screen projectors arranged in four 2 by 10 configurations..

Luminos. (2016) 272 pages.