Street Police Patrols and Crime Against Women in Public Space: Experimental Evidence from Urban India

How can gender-based violence in the public sphere (GBV) be prevented? Can increased quantity and quality of police presence help curb street harassment? What works in improving victim’s engagement with police services? This project aims to answer these questions through a novel policing program in Hyderabad, India. The Safety, Health, and Environment (SHE Teams) Program is a hotspots street police patrolling intervention targeting GBV in public spaces. The researchers and Hyderabad City Police have jointly developed a research design that aims to test the role of increased police presence through patrolling and policing visibility (i.e., uniformed vs. undercover officers). Our research will address fundamental questions in the economics of crime and gender. It is embedded within the CVI research priorities of “Security provision and the efficacy of the justice sector” and “Understudied topics and groups.” This proposal is to add to previous funding from CVI to increase our ability to identify and measure spillovers.