Research

Drug crimes continue to make up a large share of the offenses for which individuals interact with the criminal justice system in the United States, with Black Americans arrested at four times the rate of white Americans despite similar drug usage rates. In recent years, policymakers in jurisdictions across the country have deregulated recreational cannabis use, often with the explicit intention of reducing drug crime arrest disparities. Yet, causal evidence about the impact of deregulation on who police arrest is limited. In this paper, we exploit the rollout of the most widespread deregulatory approach related to recreational cannabis use—the decriminalization of cannabis possession—across the three largest US cities, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, using a difference-in-differences design. We find that decriminalization significantly reduced cannabis possession arrests. We observe that decriminalization narrowed racial disparities in arrests in Chicago by reducing small quantity possession arrests for Black individuals and in Los Angeles by reducing large quantity possession arrests for both Black and Hispanic residents. Lastly, we extend our analysis to legalization of recreational cannabis use and observe that legalization decreased arrests for every racial and ethnic group we consider, with similarly large impacts across groups.

Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. reached a record high of 107,573 in 2021, 75% of which involved opioids. In response, hundreds of police departments across the country have begun to divert individuals who possess drugs away from arrest and into substance use treatment. This paper evaluates the impact of this approach on future criminal justice system involvement as well as fatal overdose risk using arrest-level variation in diversion eligibility in Chicago between 2010-22. Drug arrest diversion primarily benefitted individuals who used narcotics every day, increased connections with substance use treatment, and reduced subsequent arrests, but had no discernible impact on fatal overdose risk. 

Crime leads to a range of adverse outcomes for those who live nearby. A common hypothesis is that this relationship is mediated by mental health. However, little is known about how the mental health of local residents is affected when an incident of violent crime occurs in their vicinity. To address this question, we pair granular crime data with uniquely detailed panel data on individual stress levels. Using nearly 50,000 responses from England's Thames Valley during the years 2010 to 2017, we find that local violent crime leads to an immediate and significant increase in residents' stress levels. We observe that this effect is strongest when the respondent is at home, and lasts approximately one week. We conclude that policies considering the total cost of crime—and conversely, crime prevention—should consider the adverse local mental health impacts of violent crime.