More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (best free e book reader .txt) 📕

percent level. The results are not sensitive to including particular control variables and always show that the benefits from these laws increase over time as more people obtain permits. The 8,192 regressions for property crime imply a less consistent relationship between right-to-carry laws and property crime, but even when drops in property crime are observed, the declines are smaller than the decrease in violent crime.

While limiting the sample size to only larger-population counties provides one possible method of dealing with "undefined" arrest rates, it has a serious drawback—information is lost by throwing out those counties with fewer than 20,000 people. Another approach is to control for either the violent- or property-crime arrest rate depending upon whether the crime rate being studied is that of violent or property crime. Even if a county has zero murders or rapes in a particular year, virtually all counties have at least some violent or property crime, thus eliminating the

"undefined" arrest rate problem and still allowing us to account for county-level changes over time in the effectiveness of law enforcement. This approach also helps mitigate any spurious relationship between crime and arrest rates that might arise because the arrest rate is a function of the crime rate. Reestimating the 4,096 regressions in figure 9.10 for murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, auto theft, burglary, and larceny with this new measure of arrest rates again produces very similar results.

City Crime Data

County data, rather than city data, allow the entire country to be examined. This is important, since, obviously, not everyone lives in cities. Such data further allow us to deal with differences in how permits are issued, such as the discretion states grant to local law enforcement. Relying on county data allows a detailed analysis of many important factors, such as arrest and conviction rates, the number of police, expenditures on police, (sometimes) prison sentences, and proxies for policing policies like the so-called broken-windows strategy (according to which police focus on less serious property crimes as a means of reducing overall violent crime). Yet a drawback with county data is that policing policies cannot be dealt with well, for such policy decisions are made at the level of individual police departments—not at the county level. 27 With a few exceptions such as San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York, where county and city boundaries coincide, only city-level data can be used to study these issues.

The focus of my research is guns and crime, but I had to make sure that I accounted for whatever policing policies are being employed. 28 Three policing strategies dominate the discussion: community-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing, and the broken-windows approach. While community-oriented policing is said to involve local community organizations directly in the policing effort, problem-oriented policing is sometimes viewed as a less intrusive version of the broken-windows policy. Problem-oriented policing began as directing patrols on the basis of identified crime patterns but nowadays involves the police in everything from cleaning housing projects and surveying their tenants to helping citizens design parking garages to reduce auto theft. 29 An extensive West-law database search was conducted to categorize which cities adopted which policing strategies as well as their adoption and rescission dates. 30

Other recent research of mine demonstrates the importance of racial and gender hiring decrees on the effectiveness of police departments. 31 When hiring rules are changed so as to create equal pass rates on hiring

EPILOGUE/ 191

exams across different racial groups—typically by replacing intelligence tests with what some claim are arbitrary psychological tests—the evidence indicates that the quality of new hires falls across the board. And the longer these new hiring policies are in place, the more detrimental the effect on police departments. As with the right-to-carry laws, simple before-and-after trends were included to measure the changing impact of these rules over time.

Let us return to the main focus, guns and crime. To examine the impact of right-to-carry laws, the following list of variables has been accounted for: city population, arrest rate by type of crime, unemployment rate, percentage of families headed by females, family poverty rate, median family income, per-capita income, percentage of the population living below poverty, percentage of the population that is white, percentage that is black, percentage that is Hispanic, percentage that is female, percentage that is less than five years of age, percentage that is between five and seventeen, percentage that is between eighteen and twenty-five, percentage that is between twenty-six and sixty-four, percentage that is sixty-five and older, median population age, percentage of the population over age twenty-five with a high school diploma, percentage of the population over age twenty-five with a college degree, and other types of gun-control laws (waiting periods, background checks, and additional penalties for using guns in the commission of a crime). As with the earlier county- and state-level data, variables are included to measure the length of state waiting periods, as well as the change in average crime rates from state waiting periods, background checks, penalties for using a gun in the commission of crime, and whether the federal Brady law altered existing state rules. Again, all estimates include variables to account for the average differences across counties and years as well as by year within region.

Table 9.4 provides strong evidence that even when detailed information on policing policies is taken into account, passing concealed-handgun laws deters violent crime. The benefit in terms of reduced murder rates is particularly large, with a drop of 2.7 percent each additional year that the right-to-carry law is in effect. The drop experienced for rapes is 1.5 percent per year. The one violent crime for which the decline is not statistically significant is aggravated assault. On the other hand, property crimes increase after the adoption of right-to-carry laws, confirming some of the earlier findings.

Consent decrees—which mandate police hiring rules that ensure equal pass rates by race and sex—significantly and adversely affect all crime categories but rape. For each additional year that