My paper with Yeondae Jung, The effect of public surveillance cameras on crime clearance rates, has recently been published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology. Here is a link to the journal version to download the PDF if you have access, and here is a link to an open read access version.

The paper examines the increase in case clearances (almost always arrests in this sample) for incidents that occurred nearby 329 public CCTV cameras installed and monitored by the Dallas PD from 2014-2017. Quite a bit of the criminological research on CCTV cameras has examined crime reductions after CCTV installations, which the outcome of that is a consistent small decrease in crimes. Cameras are often argued to help solve cases though, e.g. catch the guy in the act. So we examined that in the Dallas data.

We did find evidence that CCTV increases case clearances on average, here is the graph showing the estimated clearances before the cameras were installed (based on the distance between the crime location and the camera), and the line after. You can see the bump up for the post period, around 2% in this graph and tapering off to an estimate of no differences before 1000 feet.

When we break this down by different crimes though, we find that the increase in clearances is mostly limited to theft cases. Also we estimate counterfactual how many extra clearances the cameras were likely to cause. So based on our model, we can say something like, a case would have an estimated probability of clearance without a camera of 10%, but with a camera of 12%. We can then do that counterfactual for many of the events around cameras, e.g.:

Probability No Camera   Probability Camera   Difference
    0.10                      0.12             + 0.02
    0.05                      0.06             + 0.01
    0.04                      0.10             + 0.06

And in this example for the three events, we calculate the cameras increased the total expected number of clearances to be 0.02 + 0.01 + 0.06 = 0.09. This marginal benefit changes for crimes mostly depends on the distance to the camera, but can also change based on when the crime was reported and some other covariates.

We do this exercise for all thefts nearby cameras post installation (over 15,000 in the Dallas data), and then get this estimate of the cumulative number of extra theft clearances we attribute to CCTV:

So even with 329 cameras and over a year post data, we only estimate cameras resulted in fewer than 300 additional theft clearances. So there is unlikely any reasonable cost-benefit analysis that would suggest cameras are worthwhile for their benefit in clearing additional cases in Dallas.

For those without access to journals, we have the pre-print posted here. The analysis was not edited any from pre-print to published, just some front end and discussion sections were lightly edited over the drafts. Not sure why, but this pre-print is likely my most downloaded paper (over 4k downloads at this point) – even in the good journals when I publish a paper I typically do not get 1000 downloads.

To go on, complaint number 5631 about peer review – this took quite a while to publish because it was rejected on R&R from Justice Quarterly, and with me and Yeondae both having outside of academia jobs it took us a while to do revisions and resubmit. I am not sure the overall prevalence of rejects on R&R’s, I have quite a few of them though in my career (4 that I can remember). The dreaded send to new reviewers is pretty much guaranteed to result in a reject (pretty much asking to roll a Yahtzee to get it past so many people).

We then submitted to a lower journal, The American Journal of Criminal Justice, where we had reviewers who are not familiar with what counterfactuals are. (An irony of trying to go to a lower journal for an easier time, they tend to have much worse reviewers, so can sometimes be not easier at all.) I picked it up again a few months ago, and re-reading it thought it was too good to drop, and resubmitted to the Journal of Experimental Criminology, where the reviews were reasonable and quick, and Wesley Jennings made fast decisions as well.