FWIW, this is addressed in the article and the paper it covers: the slowdown involved reduced "proactive policing" -- "systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations" -- but the observed drop is in major crimes like burglary and assault. The authors also do some work to control for the overall crime reporting rate.

I'm a bit confused... Everyone is assuming that the police wouldn't respond to calls during this period, but the article doesn't suggest that this was the case.

Even looking through articles in 2014 and 2015 doesn't provide me with any evidence that police weren't showing up to crime scenes... just that they weren't doing the "proactive policing" thing.

Am I missing something here?

Showing up after the crime has been committed is not the same as being around to deter crime.

I'm specifically talking about showing up when crimes were reported, not whether they were deterring crimes.

what does the word proactive mean to you?

You arrest people before they can commit the offence.

I think there was a documentary about this a few years ago called Minority Report.

I think you'll find many residents of many cities will call the cops even though they know the cops usually won't do anything.

Well, sure, because the insurance company's first question will be "is there a police report."

A police report != a 911 call from a legal standpoint (to my non lawyer knowledge).

I don't know anything about NYC, but, normally, a police report actually involves the police writing down some names. So, one lives in a high crime area and one notices that the police are no longer around, one has strong incentives not to go on the record about this or that crime.

But it is the first step if you need a report written.

You can walk to a station and do it in person. That won't be logged in the 911 database.

It really isn’t. Where I am it is a form on a website.

Ages ago when I was a kid, our house was constantly being robbed. No city police in a town of 50,000

County police who took an hour or more to show up finally told my dad to get a gun and explained how we should move the body to make it look like we were being attacked. So that we didn’t get arrested.

So yea we moved promptly.

And now I want a Youtube tutorial...

Why was there no police?

Plenty of rural areas will only be serviced by a county sheriff, and there may not be that many officers. I grew up in a place like that. You could drive around forever where I grew up and never see a cop.

A few years some parents left their kid home alone while on vacation.

Neighbors knew family had gone vacation and saw movement at night. Jumpy cop, dark house, sudden movement, dead kid...

Family got big payout, City dismantled the police department.

I think their point is that it could explain the 3-6% drop. But yes, the other 94-97% of people still call.

The apathy is real

The title suggests a causation on this 4.5% change?

Paywalled, I didn’t read the article.

> “While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting,” the authors wrote, “our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory.”

Original research is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5

Both authors are political scientists who are highly unlikely to have a command of econometrics. I am not sure if they took into account the panel nature of the data and in those circumstances where authors focus solely on either the cross-section or the time-series nature of the process, it is not uncommon for "results" to be nonsense.

The article does say the study attempted to control for those variables, yeah.