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  5. Community Engagement and Public Safety: Evidence from Crime Enforcement Targeting Immigrants

American Economic Review

ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)

Community Engagement and Public Safety: Evidence from Crime Enforcement Targeting Immigrants

  • Felipe Gonçalves
  • Elisa Jácome
  • Emily Weisburst
American Economic Review (Forthcoming)

Abstract

We study the role of victim reporting in the production of public safety. We examine the Secure Communities program, a crime-reduction policy that involved police in detecting unauthorized immigrants and increased deportation fears in immigrant communities. We find that the policy reduced the likelihood that Hispanic victims report crimes to police and increased offending against Hispanics. The number of reported crimes is unchanged, masking these opposing effects. We show that reduced reporting drives the offending increase and provide the first elasticity of offending to victim reporting in the literature, calculating that a 10% decline in reporting increases offending by 7.9%.

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