Dorothy Kronick (Berkeley) will present "Oversight, Policing, and Crime: Evidence from Colombia" (with Nicolás Idrobo and Tara Slough).
Abstract: Governments often impose oversight of the police. Proponents claim that oversight curbs bad behavior, while critics counter that it undermines policing and causes crime. We argue that oversight can protect rights and public safety when it improves the accuracy of enforcement sufficiently to compensate for a decline in the quantity of policing. Studying the staged rollout of a new code of criminal procedure in Colombia, which introduced judicial oversight of arrests, we find that oversight caused a 40\% drop in the number of arrests. But crime did not increase, according to available administrative and survey data. We attribute this result to an improvement in the accuracy of enforcement: the ratio of convictions to arrests rose, and arrests for low-level crimes declined much more than arrests for serious crimes.
