Are We Underestimating the Crime Prevention Outcomes of Community Policing? The Importance of Crime Reporting Sensitivity Bias

One of the key policing innovations of the last three decades has been community-oriented policing. It is particularly important because it is one of the only proactive policing approaches that consistently improves citizen evaluations of the police. At the same time, a series of reviews have concluded that there is not persuasive evidence that community policing reduces crime.

In this paper researchers argue that these conclusions are likely flawed because of what we term crime reporting sensitivity (CRS) bias. CRS bias occurs because community policing leads to more cooperation with the police and subsequently increased crime reporting.

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