Motorized and More Motivated? Militarized Patrols and Crime in Ceará, Brasil

• In Event: Policing in the Global South

Abstract

Countries in the developing world bear high costs associated with organized crime as they struggle to reduce violence. Diverse solutions to combating organized crime often focus on retooling police forces; these approaches have proven inadequate because the problems run so deep. What happens when a corrupt and ineffective police force is displaced by a new, more militarized, and better-compensated force? Using two different empirical approaches---a difference-in-differences strategy and a regression discontinuity design that uses a population threshold to determine program eligibility---we evaluate the roll-out of the Rondas e Ações Intensivas e Ostensivas (RAIO) across municipalities in Ceará, Brazil, a state of nearly 10 million inhabitants. We find meaningful reductions in homicides and property crimes, as well as large instantaneous increases in gun seizures attributable to RAIO. Given that we identify no increases in arrests, we believe that the crime reduction effects are likely due to deterrence, rather than incapacitation of criminals. We pair these crime results with a citizen survey in Fortaleza, Ceará's capital, which includes embedded survey experiments, to better understand the mechanisms behind these improvements in public safety.

Author

• Michael Lee Weintraub, Universidad de los Andes