Medellin's government wanted to raise its efficacy, legitimacy, and control. The city identified 80 neighborhoods with weak state presence and competing armed actors. In half, they increased non-police street presence tenfold for two years, offering social services and dispute resolution. In...

We study the effects of broken windows policing on crime using geo-located crime and arrest reports for 80 Colombian cities. Broadly defined, broken windows policing consists of intensifying arrests - sometimes for minor offenses - to deter potential criminals. To estimate causal effects, we...

Test direct, spillover and aggregate effects of hot spots policing on crime in a high crime environment. Methods: We identified 967 hot spot street segments and randomly assigned 384 to a six-months increase in police patrols. To account for the complications resulting from a large experimental...

We investigate if there is any effect on crime following the installation of public surveillance cameras. To do so, we benefit from a quasi-experiment that took place in Medellin, Colombia with the installation of 587 cameras between 2013 and 2015. We highlight three main findings. First, there...

This technical note examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime and law enforcement dynamics in Colombia. The analysis uses administrative data on police reports and arrests for different types of offenses. It applies a “difference-in-differences” model, comparing the number of...

We study the effects of broken windows policing on crime using geo-located crime and arrest reports for 80 Colombian cities. Broadly defined, broken windows policing consists of intensifying arrests—sometimes for minor offenses—to deter potential criminals. To estimate causal effects, we...