Crime is Terribly Revealing: Information Technology and Police Productivity

Computing Crime: Information Technology, Police Effectiveness, and the Organization of Policing

How does information technology (IT) affect the organization of police work? How does it in turn affect police crime-fighting effectiveness? To answer these questions, we construct a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. We find that while IT adoption had substantial effects on a wide range of police organizational practices, it had, by itself, a negligible impact on crim...

Police Patrols and Crime∗

An influential literature has used the aftermath of terrorist attacks to estimate large effects of police street deployment on crime. However, the elasticities obtained in these settings may not easily extrapolate to more standard circumstances. This paper exploits a natural experiment that aimed to increase police presence in more than 6,000 well-defined areas, by economically-realistic amount...

Information Technology, Organization, and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from Police Departments

We examine how information technology (IT) contributes to organizational change, labor demand, and improved productivity in the public sector using a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. While IT adoption is associated with increased administrative and organizational complexity and use of more highly educated officers, IT itself does not appear to enhance crimefighting e...

Information, Technology, and Information Worker Productivity

We study the fine-grained relationships among information flows, IT use, and individual information-worker productivity, by analyzing work at a midsize executive recruiting firm. We analyze both project-level and individual-level performance using: (1) direct observation of over 125,000 e-mail messages over a period of 10 months by individual workers (2) detailed accounting data on revenues, co...

Can Police Prevent Crime?