CPIP Working Paper Series Paper #20203 How Valuable are Civil Liberties? Evidence from Gang Injunctions and Housing Prices in Southern California UCI Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy Emily Owens, UC Irvine Michelle D. Mioduszewski, UC Irvine Christopher J. Bates, UC Irvine 8-1-2020 How Valuable are Civil Liberties? Evidence from Gang Injunctions and Housing Prices in Southern California Emily Owens Michelle D. Mioduszewski Christopher J. Bates August 20201 Abstract Place-based and proactive policing strategies can reduce crime. However, the broader net impacts of these policies on targeted communities has yet to be quantified, meaning there is little empirical evidence on if, or when, policing is socially beneficial. Using a spatial discontinuity in constraints on police actions created by civil gang injunctions and temporal variation in when injunctions are enacted, we find that aggressive policing can reduce, rather than increase, people’s desire to live in affected neighborhoods. Mover demographics suggest that homebuyers perceive injunction areas as safe places, but where negative police encounters are common. Dividing our sample by pre-injunction crime rates suggest that net willingness-to-pay to avoid aggressive police encounters falls as the possible expected benefit from crime reduction increases. JEL Codes: K4, R2 Keywords: Policing, Crime, Inequality 1 Owens: Department of Criminology, Law and Society and Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine, Irvine CA 92697,
[email protected]. Mioduszewski: Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine, Irvine CA 92697,
[email protected]. Bates: Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine, Irvine CA 92697,
[email protected].