Summary Of The Relationship Between Violent Police And Crime Rates

The first school of thought argues that there is a negative relationship between violent crime rates and the presence of police officers. In an article called “Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime,” Levitt notices a pattern during election periods. He observed how there was a variation in the number of crimes being committed during election season and the number of police officers. He concluded that an increase in police officers reduced crime (Levitt, 1997). The article also discusses the flaws of prior research done on the impact of police and crime rates. However, the research failed to provide feasible evidence to show the connection between the two variables by making a mistake in the methodology.

The research contains inaccurate information, making the results false. They both believed that the only way to effectively determine the legitimacy of the correlation between the number of police officers and crime rates was to perform a time-series analysis (Kovandzic, Sloan, 2002). They questioned and analyzed the methods used by Marvell and Moody (1996) for examining police and crime relationship. In their study, increased police levels significantly lowered crime on the assumption that hiring more police officers reduce crime. Based on deterrence theory, hiring more officers is justifiable and deters prospective offenders from engaging in illegal activity. The risk of getting caught reduces crime due to increased police levels. To test this police-crime relationship, Florida was selected. They were ranked first for violent crime rates in 1997. The Granger test was used to determine if causation existed between crime rates and police levels. One result of the test was that it provided partial evidence that increases in crime lead to small increases in police levels. Another result was the impact of the individual UCR index crimes and the impact on police levels. Violent crime rates are substantially reduced due to increases in police

In “Crime and Police Resources: The Street Crime Initiative,” Machin and Marie (2005) talks about the impact of allocating police force resources effectively in their new policy. In order to decrease the amount of petty street crimes, the police force in the UK were divided into two groups: SCI and non-SCI. Areas that received extra funding to fight street crimes, showed a lower crime rate. With the usage of SCI, it is noted that cities with higher crime rates are likely to have bigger police forces and reduce crime rates in those areas. It also suggests that areas that received no funding, may have utilized their resources differently and took specific actions that would be effective in determining whether police force impacts crime. SCI is a program that emphasizes the role of communities while trying to combat street crime. In short, if the resources are properly utilized, the outcome would yield better results and the crime rates would