Community-Oriented Policing and Violent Crime: Evidence From the Los Angeles Community Safety Partnership

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111231162353
• Author: Ashley N. Muchow
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Quarterly

2023, Vol. 26(4) 545–572

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111231162353

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Community-Oriented Policing

and Violent Crime: Evidence

From the Los Angeles

Community Safety

Partnership

Ashley N. Muchow

1



Abstract

Over the past decade, the Los Angeles Police Department has experimented with a

unique model of community-oriented policing called the Community Safety Part-

nership (CSP). The program places a dedicated set of CSP off‌icers in select housing

developments and neighborhoods to engage with residents to better understand and

ultimately address the root causes of crime. This study examined the f‌irst four waves of

the program to assess whether, and the extent to which, the program reduced violent

crime. Results reveal signif‌icant variation in program effects, with the f‌irst wave yielding

crime reductions while subsequent waves experienced little to no change in violent

crime. Supplemental analyses suggest that the null results for the f‌inal three waves of

the program were not confounded by increases in crime reporting and reveal that

crime reductions following the program’sf‌irst wave were not achieved through in-

creases in traditional enforcement (e.g., arrests).

Keywords

community-oriented policing, violent crime, Los Angeles, minority communities

1

Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Ashley N. Muchow, Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago,

1007 W Harrison Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.

Email: muchow2@uic.edu

Introduction

Since its inception more than four decades ago, community-oriented policing (COP)

has steadily become one of the most popular alternatives to traditional policing in the

U.S. The approach proliferated in the 1990s due, in large part, to the creation

of the Off‌ice of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). From 1994 to today,

the COPS off‌ice has spent more than $14 billion in grants to police departments to

promote COP adoption (COPS., 2022). Despite its varied application and elusive

def‌inition, COP can be boiled down to strategies that address local crime through

community partnership (Cordner, 2014). While prior scholarship has documented

COP’s ability to improve police-community relations, evidence of its effectiveness in

suppressing crime remains mixed. Yet COP has received renewed attention as a means

to both address police-community tension and reduce violent crime (Norwood, 2021;

White House Press Secretary, 2022). To better understand the conditions under which

COP is effective, this study asks whether and how a Los Angeles-based COP program

improved public safety in minority communities with low levels of police trust.

In late 2011, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) implemented its Com-

munity Safety Partnership (CSP) in collaboration with the city housing authority to

improve public safety in the city’s most crime-affected public housing developments.

Spurred by early evidence of its potential to reduce crime and improve community

relations (Jannetta et al., 2014), CSP expanded to three additional housing develop-

ments and its f‌irst neighborhood site between 2015 and 2017.

1

The primary objective of

this study is to determine whether LAPD’s CSP program achieved one of its main

objectives of reducing violent crime. If this proves to be the case, a secondary objective

is to gain a better understanding of the channels through which the program had its

intended effect.

This study expands on prior research in three important ways. First, this paper

compares the effects of four separate waves of the CSP program, including the pro-

gram’sf‌irst neighborhood site. Extant research evaluating the effectiveness of CSP in

reducing crime has focused exclusively on CSP programs adopted in city housing

developments (Jannetta et al., 2014;Kahmann et al., 2022;Robin et al., 2020). This

study evaluates the f‌irst four waves of the program, permitting an assessment of

differential program effects. Second, prior work evaluating CSP has not investigated

how program effects vary over time across the program’s multiple waves. This paper

uses event studies to examine whether program effects waned, sustained, or grew over

time. Third, this paper explores the possible channels through which CSP reduced

violent crime. Prior research has devoted little empirical attention to the possible

mechanisms behind the relative success or failure of CSP efforts in suppressing crime.

This study uses information on calls for service and crime clearance, youth-related

crime, and arrests to scrutinize whether results can be explained by changes in

community cooperation, youth-focused problem solving, or traditional enforcement.

546 Police Quarterly 26(4)