PAVED With Good Intentions? An Evaluation of a French Police Predictive Policing System

From late 2017 to early 2019, one of the two french law enforcement agencies, the Gendarmerie, tested in 11 out of 101 departments its own predictive policing system named PAVED. In order to better allocate the patrolling units, the system predicts burglaries and vehicle thefts that we observe from 2015 with monthly data in each French department. We use this quasi-experimental design to evaluate whether the system produces the expected reduction in these thefts and whether this effect is due to a deterrent effect or a displacement effect. Both the standard Two Way Fixed Effect and Synthetic Difference-in-Difference estimations consistently indicate a significant reduction of vehicle thefts in the treated Gendarmerie areas but no detectable effect on burglaries. Our results indicate that vehicle theft has not increased in areas near the treated areas, suggesting that the reduction in vehicle theft is due to a deterrent effect rather than a displacement effect