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Using the Washington Nationals case, which moved from Montreal, Canada, to Washington, DC in 2005, as a natural experiment, I examine the impact of MLB games on crime in a host city. To address endogeneity concerns, this paper applies a synthetic control method with using 21 large cities which host an MLB team as a “donor pool” and employs a triple difference-in-difference approach to estimate the change in crime before and after the Nationals coming, between MLB season and off-season, and Washington, DC and the synthetic Washington. With using monthly crime data from the Uniform Crime Report, only assaults increased by 7–7.5% annually after the Nationals moved to DC; other crimes were unchanged. This result is supported by statistical significance and in-space placebo tests, and several alternative specifications in robustness check. These increases in assaults could be associated with additional costs, annually from $20 to $35 million. Little to no evidence of a causal relationship between MLB games and other types of crime.

This paper offers a methodological approach for estimating classification error in police records then determining the statistical accuracy of official crime statistics reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Classification error refers to the mistakes in UCR statistics caused by the misclassification of criminal offenses, for example recording a crime as aggravated assault when it should have been simple assault. Statistical accuracy refers to the estimated true total of each crime type based on cancelling effect of undercounting and overcounting crime due to misclassifications. The population for the study consists of the 12 largest municipal police agencies in a mostly rural southeastern state. Based on a sample of 2,663 records, the authors illustrate the impact of classification error on the total population of reported offenses. Misclassifications result in overcounting and undercounting certain crimes. The true number of each crime type, as well as the aggregate Index Crime, Violent Crime, and Property Crime totals, is estimated based the evaluation of offsetting misclassifications. The findings show that certain UCR crime categories are greatly undercounted while others are overcounted. The index crime and violent crime totals are also significantly undercounted; however, when simple assault is added to the index and violent crime categories, the error in these aggregate numbers is reduced to less than 1%. The results provide a benchmark for assessing the statistical accuracy of the UCR data.

With urban population increasing dramatically worldwide, cities are playing an increasingly critical role in human societies and the sustainability of the planet. An obstacle to effective policy is the lack of meaningful urban metrics based on a quantitative understanding of cities. Typically, linear per capita indicators are used to characterize and rank cities. However, these implicitly ignore the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration integral to the life history of cities. As such, per capita indicators conflate general nonlinear effects, common to all cities, with local dynamics, specific to each city, failing to provide direct measures of the impact of local events and policy. Agglomeration nonlinearities are explicitly manifested by the superlinear power law scaling of most urban socioeconomic indicators with population size, all with similar exponents (1.15). As a result larger cities are disproportionally the centers of innovation, wealth and crime, all to approximately the same degree. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. New rankings of cities and a novel and simpler perspective on urban systems emerge. We find that local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such (dis)advantage for decades. Spatiotemporal correlation analyses reveal a novel functional taxonomy of U.S. metropolitan areas that is generally not organized geographically but based instead on common local economic models, innovation strategies and patterns of crime.

I examine the effects that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized almost 3 million immigrants, had on crime in the United States. I exploit the IRCA's quasi-random timing as well as geographic variation in the intensity of treatment to isolate causal impacts. I find decreases in crime of 3-5 percent, primarily due to decline in property crimes, equivalent to 120,000-180,000 fewer violent and property crimes committed each year due to legalization. I calibrate a labor market model of crime, finding that much of the drop in crime can be explained by greater labor market opportunities among applicants.

Many countries have reduced refugee admissions in recent years, in part due to fears that refugees and asylum seekers increase crime rates and pose a national security risk. Existing research presents ambiguous expectations about the consequences of refugee resettlement on crime. We leverage a natural experiment in the United States, where an Executive Order by the president in January 2017 halted refugee resettlement. This policy change was sudden and significant—it resulted in the lowest number of refugees resettled on US soil since 1977 and a 66% drop in resettlement from 2016 to 2017. In this article, we find that there is no discernible effect on county-level property or violent crime rates.

Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disproportionately impacted poor and minority communities. In this paper, we document these trends. We then assess whether the crime declines can be attributed to the massive expansion of the US criminal justice system. We argue that the crime rate is certainly lower as a result of this expansion and in the early 1990s was likely a third lower than what it would have been absent changes in sentencing practices in the 1980s. However, there is little evidence that further stiffening of sentences during the 1990s—a period when prison and other correctional populations expanded rapidly—have had an impact. Hence, the growth in criminal justice populations since 1990s has exacerbated socioeconomic inequality in the United States without generating much benefit in terms of lower crime rates.

The article by Feinglass et al. in this issue of AJPH (p. 795) provides an interesting window on the immense human toll associated with assaultive gun violence (not even including the costs from gun suicides and accidents) by focusing on hospital visits in Cook County, Illinois, for gun assaults from 2018 to 2020. Shortcomings with the hospital data may give an exaggerated impression of the extent of the recent increase in shootings, and some discussion on how the situation in Chicago compared with that in the nation overall and other large cities may provide useful context for considering the broader homicide picture in America.

Vacant and abandoned buildings pose significant challenges to the health and safety of communities. In 2011 the City of Philadelphia began enforcing a Doors and Windows Ordinance that required property owners of abandoned buildings to install working doors and windows in all structural openings or face significant fines. We tested the effects of the new ordinance on the occurrence of crime surrounding abandoned buildings from January 2011 to April 2013 using a difference-in-differences approach. We used Poisson regression models to compare differences in pre- and post-treatment measures of crime for buildings that were remediated as a result of the ordinance (n = 676) or permitted for renovation (n = 241), and randomly-matched control buildings that were not remediated (n = 676) or permitted for renovation (n = 964), while also controlling for sociodemographic and other confounders measured around each building. Building remediations were significantly associated with citywide reductions in overall crimes, total assaults, gun assaults and nuisance crimes (p < 0.001). Building remediations were also significantly associated with reductions in violent gun crimes in one city section (p < 0.01). At the same time, some significant increases were seen in narcotics sales and possession and property crimes around remediated buildings (p < 0.001). Building renovation permits were significantly associated with reductions in all crime classifications across multiple city sections (p < 0.001). We found no significant spatial displacement effects. Doors and windows remediation offers a relatively low-cost method of reducing certain crimes in and around abandoned buildings. Cities with an abundance of decaying and abandoned housing stock might consider some form of this structural change to their built environments as one strategy to enhance public safety.

Objective. To evaluate the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) as a surveillance system for homicides by law enforcement officers. Methods. We assessed sensitivity and positive predictive value of the NVDRS “type of death” variable against our study count of homicides by police, which we derived from NVDRS coded and narrative data for states participating in NVDRS 2005 to 2012. We compared state counts of police homicides from NVDRS, Vital Statistics, and Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports. Results. We identified 1552 police homicides in the 16 states. Positive predictive value and sensitivity of the NVDRS “type of death” variable for police homicides were high (98% and 90%, respectively). Counts from Vital Statistics and Supplementary Homicide Reports were 58% and 48%, respectively, of our study total; gaps varied widely by state. The annual rate of police homicide (0.24/100 000) varied 5-fold by state and 8-fold by race/ethnicity. Conclusions. NVDRS provides more complete data on police homicides than do existing systems. Policy Implications. Expanding NVDRS to all 50 states and making 2 improvements we identify will be an efficient way to provide the nation with more accurate, detailed data on homicides by law enforcement.

Objectives. We estimated the frequency and examined the characteristics of intimate partner homicide and related deaths in 16 US states participating in the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), a state-based surveillance system. Methods. We used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze NVDRS data from 2003 to 2009. We selected deaths linked to intimate partner violence for analysis. Results. Our sample comprised 4470 persons who died in the course of 3350 intimate partner violence–related homicide incidents. Intimate partners and corollary victims represented 80% and 20% of homicide victims, respectively. Corollary homicide victims included family members, new intimate partners, friends, acquaintances, police officers, and strangers. Conclusions. Our findings, from the first multiple-state study of intimate partner homicide and corollary homicides, demonstrate that the burden of intimate partner violence extends beyond the couple involved. Systems (e.g., criminal justice, medical care, and shelters) whose representatives routinely interact with victims of intimate partner violence can help assess the potential for lethal danger, which may prevent intimate partner and corollary victims from harm.