An Experimental Evaluation of Hot Spot Policing in Brazil (with Gaston Pezzuchi, Rodrigo Serrano-Berthet and Eduardo Fagundes) 

This project is the first experimental assessment of preventive patrolling in Brazil. We partnered with Parana Military Police to design and test hot spots policing on crime in Curitiba, Brazil. We identified 557 hot spot street segments and randomly assigned 214 to receive more police visits over the intervention period and will compare this treatment effect against business-as-usual random patrols at hotspots. We also use non-experimental streets to test for spillovers onto non-hot spots and examine aggregate effects citywide. This study will complement the scant literature on hotspot policing in Latin America which so far has shown limited impact. The intervention started on March 2023. 

Militarized, Motorized Patrols to Reduce Homicides and other Violent Crimes in Ceará, Brazil (with Michael Weintraub, Rodrigo Serrano and Andre Mancha) 

Militarized policing strategies to combat high homicide and violent crime rates are common across the developing world. While empirical evidence on the effectiveness of militarized policing in Latin America is weak—the only randomized militarized policing intervention, in Cali, Colombia, showed no crime reduction effects (Blair and Weintraub 2023a) – we still understand little about how militarized patrols are deployed throughout the region, whether they are effective, and what their secondary consequences might be. In cooperation with the Ceará government, we will conduct two quasi-experimental impact evaluations of RAIO patrols. The first exploits the rollout of RAIO bases across Ceará’s 184 municipalities. The second uses high-frequency GPS data from RAIO patrols within Fortaleza and leverages plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to those patrols to assess whether RAIO patrols decrease crime. A citizen survey of nearly 3,000 respondents – including embedded survey experiments – will help us understand contact with and attitudes towards RAIO, the military, and the police.