CLEAN Seminar - Emily Weisburst (UCLA)

The next CLEAN seminar will take place on Monday 3 April in distance at 4.30pm Italian time.

The presenter will be Emily Weisburst (UCLA). The title of the paper is: "Immigration Enforcement, Crime, and Community Trust in Police".

Abstract:

This paper studies the impact of immigration enforcement on both public safety and victim willingness to contact the police. While heightened immigration enforcement may improve safety by incapacitating serious offenders, safety may suffer if victims are unwilling to report crimes. We examine the Secure Communities program in the United States, which increased cooperation between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and significantly increased the volume of detentions and deportations of unauthorized immigrants. Using survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that Hispanic individuals who are victims of a crime are less likely to report their incident to the police and Hispanic individuals are more likely to become victims of a crime after the program’s introduction. These two opposing effects lead to a null impact on reported crimes, explaining previous studies’ findings that this program did not alter reported crime rates. We provide evidence that the decline in Hispanic reporting is a key channel driving their increased victimization. Our findings shed light on the importance of directly measuring victim reporting practices for understanding the impact of criminal justice policies.

You may follow the event online via Zoom Meetings at the following link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/93968552765?pwd=cEJoTDFldWZNL3BZZWZNdWtzSXZwUT09  - passcode: 153790