Fostering Community Cooperation to Fight Crime

This project has been canceled. For eight months JPAL-LAC, the Ministry of Interior of Ecuador, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) have been working together to identify opportunities of evaluation in security policies financed by the IADB. From the cooperation, they have identified the “Asambleas Comunitarias” program as a subject for evaluation. Ecuador’s National Police and the Ministry of Interior have been working on this intervention to focus part of their efforts in creating a program in which community and government agencies jointly participate in creating actions plans to affect immediate causes of crime (extensive analysis of risk factors), which are jointly monitored, executed and evaluated (coordinated action and accountability). This evaluation will help make a step forward in the field of crime research as it is still unknown whether and under what circumstances citizen participation could improve security and whether this is effective in the setting of a developing country.