Keep the Kids Inside: Juvenile Curfews, Bad Weather, and Urban Gun Violence - Working Paper

Carr and Doleac make an interesting comparison between imposed curfew and 'natural' curfew in "Keep the Kids Inside: Juvenile Curfews, Bad Weather, and Urban Gun Violence". 

Abstract:     

"Gun violence is an important problem in many American cities, large and small. Due to limited data, it has been difficult to convincingly test the impacts of government policies on the quantity and geography of gunfire. This paper is the first to use a new source of data on gunfire incidents, which does not suffer from selective underreporting common in other crime datasets. We test the incapacitation effects of two interventions in Washington, DC: (1) juvenile curfews, and (2) rain. Both work primarily by keeping would-be offenders indoors. The former is a common, but extremely controversial, policy used in cities across the United States, and its impact is highly sensitive to how it is enforced. The latter is an intervention over which we have no control, but can be thought of as a perfectly-enforced incapacitation "policy": anyone who stays outside during a rainstorm gets wet. We use exogenous variation in the hours affected by each intervention to estimate its causal impact on gun violence and reported crime. We find minimal evidence that juvenile curfews are effective, but rainstorms result in large, statistically-significant reductions in gun violence and other crime. It thus appears that it is possible to remove would-be offenders from the streets, but juvenile curfews do not have this effect. We interpret these results as evidence that incapacitation works as a crime-prevention tool, and a reminder that implementation and enforcement are key determinants of a policy’s success".

The study serves as a proof-of-concept for 'incapacitation' while at the same time showing that one of the tools used, juvenile curfew, is not really effective. Policy implications are interesting. Is rain-making technology a useful tool during crime waves? Seeing that juvenile curfew is not effective, which is the key failure of the curfew? what other tools should we be looking at in terms of incapacitation? Not to forget that incapacitation could also be understood from a positive perspective, that is kids are not on the streets because they are doing something else.