Fire alarms for police patrols: Experimental evidence on co-production of public safety

Abstract

Effective public goods provision requires co-production by both citizens and the government. Search costs which impede citizens’ abilities to share information constitute a critical and understudied impediment to this co-production. We experimentally evaluate search costs in a rural, conflict-affected province of the Philippines. We randomize the rollout of a police hotline which dramatically reduces the costs of reporting, and compare it against both the status quo and an alternative intervention which builds trust but does not affect search costs. The hotline increased the likelihood of reporting crimes by 10–19 percentage points. The intervention reduced perceived insurgent activity but had no perceptible impact on ordinary crime. Our findings suggest that addressing search costs substantially impede service delivery, potentially explaining why policies imported from higher-capacity countries may fail to achieve results in developing contexts.

Cite

@article{nanes2023fire,
title={Fire alarms for police patrols: Experimental evidence on coproduction of public safety},
author={Nanes, Matthew and Ravanilla, Nico and Haim, Dotan},
journal={The Journal of Politics},
volume={85},
number={3},
pages={1017--1032},
year={2023},
publisher={The University of Chicago Press Chicago, IL}
}