Impact evaluation of the LAPD community safety partnership

Abstract

In 2011, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), in conjunction with other governmental and nonprofit groups, launched the Community Safety Partnership (CSP) in several public housing developments in Los Angeles. Following a relationship-based policing model, officers were assigned to work collaboratively with community members to reduce crime and build trust. However, evaluating the causal impact of this policy intervention is difficult, given the notable differences between communities where CSP was implemented and the surrounding communities in South Los Angeles. In this paper we use a novel data set, based on the LAPD’s reported crime incidents and calls-for-service, to evaluate the effectiveness of this program via augmented synthetic control models, a cutting-edge method for policy evaluation. We perform falsification analyses to evaluate the robustness of the results. In the public housing developments where it was first deployed, we find that CSP exhibited modest but statistically insignificant reductions in reported violent crime incidents, shots fired and violent crime calls-for-service, and Part I reported crime incidents. We do not find evidence of crime displacement from CSP regions to neighboring control regions.