If the goal is less crime, here is what the evidence actually supports.
The same standard applied to the cameras is applied here: randomized trials and natural experiments first, effect sizes stated, and every study's own limits printed alongside it. Nothing on this page is offered as a reason to defund a police department — the evidence for policing is on it too.
Fewer murder and assault arrests associated with one additional year of schooling, using changes in compulsory-schooling laws as a natural experiment.
Lochner & Moretti (2004), American Economic Review
Reduction in violent-crime arrests among participants in a Chicago cognitive behavioural therapy programme, in randomized trials, at under $2,000 per participant.
Heller et al. (2017), Quarterly Journal of Economics
Reduction in later criminal behaviour associated with early childhood education.
Anders, Barr & Smith (2023), AEJ: Policy
The studies, with their limits
The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports
Using changes in compulsory-schooling laws as a natural experiment, one additional year of schooling is associated with roughly a 30% reduction in murder and assault arrests, and about 20% for motor vehicle theft.
“a 1-percent increase in male high school graduation rates would save as much as $1.4 billion”
Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti · read it
Limitation: A natural experiment rather than a randomized trial. Later work has argued part of the effect comes from teenagers simply being in a building during the hours they would otherwise be out — which is a real effect, but a different one.
Thinking, Fast and Slow? Some Field Experiments to Reduce Crime and Dropout in Chicago
Randomized trials of a cognitive behavioural therapy programme for high-school boys found violent-crime arrests fell by roughly 45–50% among participants, at under $2,000 per participant.
Sara Heller and colleagues · read it
Limitation: Effects on violent-crime arrests were larger and better identified than effects on other outcomes, and some effects faded after the programme ended. Benefit–cost estimates in the literature range widely, from about 5:1 to 30:1.
The Effect of Early Childhood Education on Adult Criminality
Early childhood education is associated with large reductions in later criminal behaviour, which the authors put at around 20%.
John Anders, Andrew Barr, Alexander Smith · read it
Limitation: Effects are measured decades after the intervention, which makes them robust but also makes them slow — this is not a lever a city council pulls for results next year.
Acquisitive Crime and Inflation in the United States: 1960–2012
Error-correction models across 52 years found inflation was the only economic indicator with consistent effects on crimes committed for monetary gain.
“Among the economic indicators, only inflation has consistent and robust short- and long-run effects on year-over-year change in the offense types under consideration.”
Richard Rosenfeld and Aaron Levin · read it
Limitation: This measures inflation — a rate of price change — not the cost of living as a level. The authors' proposed mechanism runs in both directions: the effect reverses when price increases slow. Nothing in this literature measures rent burden or housing affordability.
Crime and Inflation in U.S. Cities
The national finding replicated at city level across 17 US cities, 1960–2013, with a statistically significant effect in 12 of the 17.
“The 17 cities in the study are not necessarily representative of all large US cities. Caution should be exercised, therefore, in generalizing the results beyond the sample.”
Richard Rosenfeld, Joel Vogel, Timothy McCuddy · read it
Limitation: The authors' own caution is quoted above. The effect is real and replicated, and it is modest — a standardized coefficient of about 0.099, with five of the seventeen cities showing no significant effect.
The Changing Returns to Crime: Do Criminals Respond to Prices?
Using global commodity price shocks as an instrument for the value of stealable goods, thefts of a given product rose when that product's price rose — London, 2002–2012.
Mirko Draca, Theodore Koutmeridis, Stephen Machin · read it
Limitation: A genuine causal design, and the strongest support for the mechanism. It covers London, 2002–2012, and property crime specifically.
Identifying the Effect of Unemployment on Crime
An instrumental-variables study of US states found stable positive effects of unemployment on property crime.
“significantly positive effects of unemployment on property crime rates that are stable across model”
Steven Raphael and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer · read it
Limitation: Evidence for violent crime was considerably weaker — a pattern that holds across this whole literature. Economic pressure tracks property crime much more closely than it tracks violence.
Are U.S. Cities Underpoliced? Theory and Evidence
Additional police officers reduce crime, with an estimated elasticity of about −0.5 for violent crime.
Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary · read it
Limitation: Included because a page about what reduces crime that omits the evidence for policing is a page nobody should trust. The estimates are for police numbers, not for any particular technology or tactic.
Where the evidence is thinner than people assume
Inflation is not the cost of living. The research above measures inflation — a rate of price change — and finds it predicts crimes committed for money. None of it measures a price level, a rent burden, or housing affordability, and the mechanism the researchers propose runs in both directions: the effect reverses when price increases slow. A claim that an expensive city is therefore a high-crime city is not supported by any study on this page.
The 2021–23 inflation spike is a test case, and it mostly did not confirm the prediction. Consumer prices peaked near 9% in mid-2022. Over the same period larceny and residential burglary fell. Motor vehicle theft rose sharply — and the researchers who studied it attribute that largely to a specific vehicle security defect, not to the economy.
Economic conditions track property crime much more closely than violence. That asymmetry holds across the whole literature, including in the instrumental-variables work that identifies the effect most credibly.
The sharpest income finding is narrower than “poverty causes crime.” When young people lost disability income at eighteen, charges rose about 20% — but that breaks down to a roughly 60% rise in offences committed for money and a statistically insignificant change in everything else. People commit crimes for money when the money stops. That is a specific claim, and it is defensible.