Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/733
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Item Blood and black gold: natural resource extraction and violent crime on American Indian reservations(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2023) Sikoski, Laura Kate; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Wendy A. StockUsing 2001 to 2016 precinct-level crime data, I examine the relationship between natural resource development in the Bakken oil fields and violent crime on American Indian reservations. While previous studies find positive effects of the Bakken oil boom on crime, the impacts of the oil boom on crime within reservations have never been evaluated. I find that the increase in crime caused by the Bakken oil boom was significantly more severe in reservations, driving the increase in regional crime found by other studies. These results suggest that community safety outcomes should be considered by federal, state, and tribal governments for future natural resource development on reservation.Item Is sharing really caring? Estimating the effects of federal asset forfeiture revenue sharing on local policing outcomes(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2023) Buzzard, Jadon Jediah; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Isaac SwensenCivil asset forfeiture, whereby police agencies may profit from seized assets without a criminal conviction, is a contentious practice. Despite high-profile instances of abuse, law enforcement has made strong claims that forfeiture provides a critical funding mechanism for police departments. This paper offers a unique strategy to identify the causal relationship between asset forfeiture revenue and local policing outcomes, measured by crime reports and clearances (a standard proxy for police effort). I estimate the impact of a temporary suspension of Equitable Sharing, a program allowing local police agencies to financially benefit from asset forfeitures done in collaboration with federal law enforcement. The suspension was a plausibly exogenous shock to the forfeiture revenue received by participating police agencies. I exploit pre-suspension variation in program participation to study this interruption as a quasi-experiment; using a difference-in-differences design, my model estimates the differential impact of the suspension on participating agencies (treated) relative to non-participating agencies (control). My results indicate that the suspension led to a 4.7% increase in the number of violent crimes reported within participating agency jurisdictions relative to the baseline mean, but it also offers suggestive evidence of a small (2.5%) decrease in property crime reports as a result of the suspension. These effects appear to cancel out, producing a consistent null effect on total crime reports. While my results for violent crime are quite robust, the results for property crimes are more sensitive to model specification. My results for crime clearances also turn out to be inconclusive; as such, further research is required to determine whether the suspension's impact on crime reports stems from a change in police effort or an alternative explanatory mechanism.Item The effect of access to concealed carry permit data: evidence from North Carolina(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2019) Dwinell, Conner Joseph; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Isaac SwensenGun regulation in the United States is a contentious political issue. This is exacerbated by the fact that the economics literature has not come to a clear consensus on the effects gun possession has on crime. In this paper, I examine whether access to online gun permit data deters criminal behavior. On July 12th, 2012, WRAL, a Raleigh, North Carolina local television station, published a database containing the number of concealed carry permits held on every street in the station's viewing area. This allowed members of the public to search the database and find the number of permits at the street level in twenty-two of the 100 total counties. This paper studies how public availability of concealed carry permit data affects violent and property crime rates. I use multiple difference-in-differences strategies, exploiting variation in the timing of WRAL's database going online, inclusion in the television station's viewing area, and agency-level permit concentration to examine the effect of a plausibly exogenous shock to crime in North Carolina. My findings indicate that there are no statistically significant changes in property or violent crime rates for counties whose permit data was published relative to those outside WRAL's viewership area. I also find no evidence of crimes shifting between areas of high and low gun concentration. However, an extension of my empirical model suggests that applications for concealed carry permits rise by approximately 18.1% in treated counties after publication of the concealed carry database.Item Long-term impacts of childhood Medicaid expansions on crime(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2018) Hendrix, Logan James; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Wendy A. StockThis paper examines the effects of public health insurance expansions among children in the 1980s and 1990s on their criminal activity later in life. Using a panel of the states' 1980-1990 birth cohorts and a simulated eligibility instrumental variables strategy, I find that increases in the fraction of children eligible for public health insurance lead to substantial reductions in criminal activity. Considering the extraordinary costs of crime to victims, public budgets, and offenders, these findings suggest a previously unrecognized substantial benefit to the provision of public health insurance to children.Item The causal effect of police brutality on local crime: evidence from Chicago(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2017) Noray, Kadeem; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark AndersonUsing recently digitized complaints made about Chicago police officers released by the Citizen's Police Data Project, I estimate the effect of police brutality on short-term local crime. My empirical strategy uses conditionally random variation in the timing and location of serious excessive force incidents within Chicago to identify the causal relationship between these incidents and local crime. I also explore how this relationship changes with proximity to where a brutality incident occurred, the race of the victim, and the race of the offending officer. I find that, within a month after a brutality incident occurred, the average incident is associated with a one percent decrease in citywide violent crime. Within a community where an incident occurred, however, there is a three percent increase in violent crime and a two percent increase in total crime. Expanding out to the district, the total crime effect disappears, and the violent crime effect diminishes to two percent but remains positive. I also find that if the victim of a brutality incident is black, the community-level effect on violent crime increased to four percent, the district-level effect on violent crime increased to seven percent, and property crime increased by six percent at the district-level. If the offending officer is white and the victim is black (a.k.a. if the incident is potentially racially charged), there is a ten percent increase in total crime and an 18 percent increase in property crime within a month after the incident, both at the community-level.Item Montana criminal justice personnel attitudes toward the mentally retarded offender(Montana State University - Bozeman, 1987) Christensen, Marsha Ann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Richard L. HainesItem Compulsory schooling laws and in-school crime : are delinquents incapacitated?(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2012) Pennig, Luke Alouisious; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Gregory Gilpin.Minimum dropout age (MDA) laws have been touted as effective policies to bring delinquents off streets and into classrooms. These laws work mainly through incapacitating delinquents by decreasing the number of unsupervised hours available to commit crime. Given that these laws constrain delinquent juveniles, one question to better understand the costs and benefits of these laws is: to what extent do MDA laws displace crime from streets to schools? Answering this question may be valuable given that in-school crime affects education production through creating a negative and unsafe learning environment, which may lead to decreases in student achievement. This research extends the sparse research on in-school crime by studying how MDA laws affect crimes committed in U.S. public high schools. The analysis is conducted using a difference-in-difference estimator exploiting variation between state-level MDA laws over time. The results indicate that a MDA of 18 significantly increases in-school crime. Specifically, attacks without a weapon, threats without a weapon, and drug incidences. A MDA of 17 is found to have no effect on in-school crime.