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Letters and cards telling people about local police reduce crime

A combination of Internet-based and field experiments suggests that being given personal information about a stranger leads people to believe that they themselves are known to that person — and to change their behaviour accordingly.
  1. Elicia John

    1. Elicia John is at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California 90401, USA, and in the Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington DC.

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  2. Shawn D. Bushway

    1. Shawn D. Bushway is at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California 90401, USA.

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Community policing is often held up as an instrumental part of reforms to make policing less harmful, particularly in low-income communities that have high rates of violence. But building collaborative relationships between communities and police is hard. Writing in Nature, Shah and LaForest1 describe a large field experiment revealing that giving residents cards and letters with basic information about local police officers can prevent crime. Combining these results with those from Internet-based experiments, the authors attribute the observed reduction in crime to perceived ‘information symmetry’.

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Nature 603, 233-235 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00152-0

References

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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