An Experimental Evaluation of Hot Spot Policing in Brazil, 2024.

Public security in Latin America remains heavily reliant on militarized practices that have proven ineffective in reducing crime and violence, falling behind the data-driven approaches that have driven policing innovations in developed countries over the past decades. This paper presents the results of an initiative to foster the adoption of evidence-based practices by police forces in Brazil. We partnered with the Paraná Military Police to design and test the impact of hot spot policing on robberies in Curitiba, Brazil. We identified 422 hot spot street segments, where 22 percent of the city’s 2022 robberies occurred, and randomly assigned half of them to receive increased police visits during weekdays. The experiment extended patrol time by an additional 15 minutes for three months, which represents an increase in 167 percent compare to baseline levels. The treated segments experienced a 22 percent reduction in robberies during weekdays, with no effect on untreated days. The reduction persisted for an additional three months but disappeared afterward, as increased patrols were not sustained due to resource constraints. We found no evidence that crime was displaced to nearby areas, though thefts did increase. Further analysis is underway to understand this rise in thefts. The paper also discusses the factors that enabled the implementation of the first randomized controlled trial by a police force in Brazil, a field rarely open to experimentation.

A New Path to Police Reform? Effects of a New Police Squad in Ceará, Brazil (with Michael Weintraub e Andre Mancha), 2024.

Policymakers in violent societies have explored a range of options to reform law enforcement institutions, with the goals of making the police better able to reduce crime, less abusive of human rights, and more legitimate in the eyes of the communities they serve. Some governments, deterred from adopting more thoroughgoing reforms, have created new policing squads, yet we know little about their efficacy. We study the creation of the Rondas e Ações Intensivas e Ostensivas (RAIO) in Ceará, Brazil, a new police squad that features militarized, motorcycle-based patrols. 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 find meaningful reductions in homicides and property crimes. Given that we also find a decrease in arrests, we believe 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. We find that the motorcycle—which signals rapid response—is particularly important for increasing residents’ perceptions of effectiveness, safety, and the likelihood of using force against criminals. However, the RAIO uniform is far more important in reducing perceptions of abuse and corruption, which suggest that RAIO officers have differentiated themselves as a more just police force.

Incremental Managerial Reforms in Police Forces: Evidence from a Pay-for-Performance Program in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (with Sandro Cabral, Sergio Firpo, Marcelo Marchesini e Leonardo Viotti), 2024. 

We combine expectancy and incentives theories to analyze if teams expecting to be eligible for bonuses enhance performance in policing activities. Results using an observational data dataset of a Brazilian police agency demonstrate that being eligible to receive bonuses in semester-based collective PFP programs contribute to crime reduction on targeted and nontargeted indicators, but at the same time may induce gaming behavior. This paper highlights the implications of collective PFP programs on policing performance, especially close to the end of the semester.  

Regaining the Monopoly of Violence: Evidence from the Pacification of Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas (with Claudio Ferraz and Bruno Ottoni), 2023.

The proliferation of non-state armed groups and their local dominance of territories in in many developing countries has often resulted in a dramatic increase in criminal violence. This paper examines the effects of a large intervention aimed at retaking control of slums dominated by drug gangs in the city of Rio de Janeiro.We use the diferential timing in the implementation of this policy to asses its impact on crime both inside and outside slums. We find that territorial occupation by the police in slums significantly decreases violence and property crimes not only in these areas but also in their surroundings. We detect negative spillovers to neighboring municipalities, which suggests that criminal groups relocate and fight for turfs in regions previously liberated from their rule. 

Monitoring street-level bureaucrats: the impact of body-worn cameras on police performance (with Eduardo Fagundes and Pedro Souza), 2023

The police is a key institution for well-functioning states since it has the right of using violent means to enforce the law. Recent incidents of controversial use-of-force by police officers may undermine confidence in the police and state institutions in general as well as cause negative spillovers in human capital formation. In this paper, we study how the introduction of a monitoring technology, body-worn cameras, in one of the largest police departments of the world affected worker performance. Exploiting variation in treatment timing across police units of Sao Paulo’s Police Department, we find evidence that the cameras significantly reduce killings and injuries by police officers. We show that these results do not come from diminished police efforts or changes in citizen behavior. Rather, the increase in internal reporting margins suggests that the main mechanism at play is related to increased compliance to internal rules and protocols. These findings contribute to our understanding on how monitoring may influence agency problems related to the provision of public goods and services in general.  

Measuring the Expansion of Armed Criminal Groups in Rio de Janeiro (with Eduardo Fagundes, Mariana Carvalho and Ramon Chaves), 2023.

Many urban areas around the world are marked by the presence of armed criminal groups that often control territories and exploit several economic activities. Yet data on where these actors operate and what activities they engage in is scarce and rarely available to the public. This article introduces a new, comprehensive dataset with the presence and economic outreach of criminal groups that operate in Rio de Janeiro, a city where drug factions and militia groups have controlled territories for at least three decades. We use automated text analysis to read more than 420,000 citizen reports on criminal groups’ activities to map their presence, geographical expansion and characterize their economic activities in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro over a 12 year period. We validate our measure of group presence with intelligence data and analyze how group presence correlates with measures of violence and criminal records.

Criminal governance in times of crisis: Evidence from the COVID-19 outbreak in Rio de Janeiro (with Benjamin Lessing and Santiago Tobon), 2023

In urban peripheries worldwide, and especially in Latin America, criminal groups use  coercive power to impose rules on and provide order to civilians. The reasons why gangs govern in particular ways, or at all, are poorly understood. Many charge taxes in exchange for governance provision—suggesting they act as stationary bandits—but some do not. Many control retail drug markets, but some also earn rents from licit goods and services like cooking gas and internet. During the COVID-19 crisis, anecdotes of gangs enforcing lockdowns and providing health-related public goods suggested they seized opportunities to consolidate their authority and perceived legitimacy.  We present novel, systematic data on  criminal governance practices in Rio de Janeiro, whose gangs are notoriously militarized, persistent, and—usefully, from our perspective—diverse. While many belong to prison-based drug syndicates, others are police-linked groups known as milicias. We surveyed residents from almost 200 favelas about local gangs’ type, economic and governance activities,  taxation, and pandemic response. Contrary to expectations, we find that drug gangs and  milícias alike earn rents from a range of licit products and services, enjoy similarly high levels of perceived legitimacy, and largely avoided involvement in pandemic response. Yet milicias are far more likely to tax, and seldom sell drugs. Our findings suggest that gangs’ core motives are economic rather than political, that they strategically distinguish between direct taxation and extracting monopoly rents from control over utilities. 

Learning to Punish. Resource Windfalls and Political Accountability (with Claudio Ferraz), 2014. 

We use exogenous variation from oil-based revenues paid to local governments in Brazil to test whether voters reward incumbent mayors for increasing government spending and whether this reward varies over time as voters learn about the source of revenues and public service delivery. We find that an unexpected increase in oil-based revenues increase reelection rates for incumbents in the short-run. However, when we look over different elections allowing voters to learn about the revenue windfall and public goods’ provision, we find different results. The reelection rates of incumbents, in elections that occur 10 years after the beginning of the oil boom, is lower when municipalities had an early oil windfall, when a large share of voters are informed (i.e.high media penetration and educated), and when public services and local development have not improved over the past decade

Media Networks and Political Accountability: Evidence from Radio Networks in Brazil (with Horacio Lareguy), 2014.

We examine how different types of media structure contribute to political accountability, analyzing the role of local radio stations, regional radio networks and television stations in compensating for the bias of Brazil’s federal government against non-aligned municipality mayors when allocating drought relief aid. Theoretical and empirical evidence shows that radio networks play a central role in reducing federal government bias due to their ability to exchange information among affiliated radio stations operating in different municipalities. Radio networks, however, are only effective when they contain non-aligned municipalities that received federal aid; only information from such municipalities reveals the federal government’s bias.  

The Effects of Pacification Policy on Drug Faction Conflicts in Rio de Janeiro, 2013.