Community Engagement and Public Safety: Evidence from Crime Enforcement Targeting Immigrants

This paper studies how immigration enforcement affects public safety, asking two questions: (1) what is the effect of increased enforcement on criminal victimization, and (2) how does increased enforcement affect victims’ willingness to report crimes to police? The authors exploit the staggered rollout of the U.S. Secure Communities (SC) program — the largest expansion of interior immigration enforcement in U.S. history — across counties between 2008 and 2013. SC expanded information sharing between local police and federal immigration authorities, causing ICE honored detainer requests to increase by over 50% following program activation.

The primary data source is the restricted-access National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which measures victimizations independently of whether they were reported to police and includes respondent ethnicity. This allows the authors to separately estimate effects on underlying crime incidence and on reporting behavior for Hispanic and non-Hispanic individuals. The empirical strategy uses a staggered difference-in-differences design following Sun and Abraham (2021), comparing earlier-treated counties to the last 25% of counties to activate SC, with estimates run separately by ethnicity.

The main findings run contrary to the stated policy goal of improving public safety. Among Hispanic individuals, SC caused a statistically significant 0.15 percentage point increase in monthly victimization — a 16% increase relative to the pre-period baseline of 0.9 percentage points — implying approximately 1.3 million additional crimes against Hispanics in the two years following program activation. The increase is concentrated primarily in property crimes (a statistically significant 15% increase), with a similarly sized but imprecisely estimated 15% increase in violent crime victimizations. The victimization increase is larger for Hispanic females (0.23 percentage points, or 25%) and in counties with higher shares of non-citizen Hispanic residents.

Simultaneously, SC caused a 9.5 percentage point decline in the likelihood that Hispanic victims report incidents to police — a 30% decline relative to the pre-period mean reporting rate of 33 percentage points. This reporting decline is primarily driven by a 34% decline in the reporting of property offenses. No changes in victimization or reporting are found for non-Hispanic individuals in the aggregate, though non-Hispanic individuals in neighborhoods with high Hispanic population shares do experience higher victimization rates after SC.

Critically, reported crime rates (the product of victimization and reporting) are unchanged for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic individuals, explaining why prior studies using administrative reported-crime data found null effects of SC. The null effect on reported crime masks two large, opposing causal forces.

The authors provide evidence that the decline in crime reporting is the primary driver of the increase in victimization. Cohorts with larger reporting declines experienced larger victimization increases, and a decomposition exercise shows the reporting decline is substantially more important than concurrent SC-induced changes in unemployment, wages, female-headed household shares, and the male immigrant share. Supporting data from 75 police departments confirm no change in 911 call volumes or total arrest volumes, while showing a decline in the Hispanic share of arrestees in both Hispanic and non-Hispanic neighborhoods — consistent with reduced reporting leading to reduced apprehension of offenders, with offending shifting toward non-Hispanic individuals.

Scope conditions: results are estimated for the population residing in counties exceeding 100,000 residents (representing 61% of total U.S. population and 69% of the Hispanic population), excluding southern border counties and states that actively resisted SC implementation (Illinois, Massachusetts, New York). Effects apply to all Hispanic respondents — citizens and non-citizens — consistent with prior evidence that citizen Hispanics respond to immigration enforcement out of concern for non-citizen contacts.

Q: What was the Secure Communities program and how was it implemented? A: SC was a federal program launched in 2008 that required fingerprints of individuals booked into local jails to be forwarded not only to the FBI but also to the Department of Homeland Security, enabling automatic screening for immigration violations. Local authorities could not prevent federal officials from learning of an arrestee’s immigration status. The program rolled out county-by-county between October 2008 and January 2013 due to technological constraints and resource bottlenecks, generating the staggered variation used for identification.

Q: How large was the first-stage effect on actual immigration enforcement? A: County-level honored ICE detainer requests increased by over 50% following SC activation, with a similar 40% increase in all detainer requests. The number of honored detainers nationwide doubled between 2008 and 2012. Over 90% of detainers and removals in any given month were for individuals of Hispanic ethnicity.

Q: What is the main finding on Hispanic victimization? A: SC caused a 0.15 percentage point increase in monthly Hispanic victimization rates, a 16% increase relative to the pre-period baseline of 0.9 percentage points. This translates to approximately 1.3 million additional crimes against Hispanics over two years following program activation, calculated by multiplying the monthly effect by 24 months and the 35.3 million Hispanics in the sample counties.

Q: What is the main finding on Hispanic crime reporting? A: SC caused a 9.5 percentage point decline in the likelihood that Hispanic victims report incidents to police, a 30% decline relative to the pre-period mean reporting rate of 33 percentage points. This decline occurred relatively quickly after activation and was concentrated in property offenses, where reporting fell by 34%.

Q: Why do reported crime rates show no change despite large shifts in victimization and reporting? A: Reported crime rates — the probability of being victimized and reporting the crime — are unchanged because the 16% increase in victimization and the 30% decline in reporting are approximately offsetting in magnitude. This explains why prior work using administrative police data (Miles and Cox 2014; Treyger et al. 2014; Hines and Peri 2019) found null effects of SC on reported crime: those data sources cannot separately identify the two underlying changes.

Q: Does SC affect non-Hispanic individuals? A: In the aggregate, SC has no statistically significant effect on non-Hispanic victimization or reporting. However, non-Hispanic individuals living in neighborhoods with high Hispanic population shares do experience victimization increases, and in those neighborhoods their reporting rates also decline slightly. Re-weighting non-Hispanic respondents to match the county composition of Hispanic respondents yields an 8% increase in non-Hispanic victimization, suggesting spillover effects in Hispanic-dense areas.

Q: What mechanism links the reporting decline to the victimization increase? A: The authors argue that reduced victim reporting lowers the probability that offenders are apprehended, thereby reducing the cost of committing crimes. They demonstrate this through two analyses: first, cohorts of counties with larger reporting declines experienced larger victimization increases; second, a decomposition shows the reporting channel is substantially more important than concurrent SC-induced changes in unemployment, wages, female-headed household shares, and the male immigrant share of the population.

Q: What do the police administrative data show about offender composition? A: Data from 75 police departments show no change in 911 call volumes or total arrest volumes following SC — consistent with the NCVS finding of unchanged reported crime rates. However, the Hispanic share of arrestees declined after SC, with a 1.5 percentage point drop in Hispanic neighborhoods (off a base of 54%), suggesting the rise in offending was more concentrated among non-Hispanic offenders as reduced reporting lowered expected punishment probabilities.

Q: How does the victimization effect vary by gender? A: The victimization point estimate for Hispanic males is 0.085 percentage points and imprecisely estimated (SE = 0.088). For Hispanic females, the effect is over 2.5 times larger at 0.23 percentage points, a 25% increase. The decline in reporting is comparable in magnitude across male and female Hispanic victims, suggesting fear of enforcement is similar by gender but that females disproportionately bear the crime burden.

Q: How does the victimization effect vary by neighborhood non-citizen Hispanic share? A: Victimization effects for Hispanics are relatively constant across neighborhood types but are higher — around 25% — in neighborhoods with the highest shares of non-citizen Hispanics. Counties with higher non-citizen Hispanic shares also exhibit higher ICE removal rates, indicating greater total enforcement, and these counties have higher victimization effects. Reporting declines among Hispanics appear relatively uniform across neighborhood types.

Q: Could survey attrition or compositional changes explain the results? A: The authors rule this out through several tests. First, SC has no statistically significant effect on household survey response rates, even in Census tracts above the 90th percentile of Hispanic share. A worst-case bias calculation implies attrition could account for at most 26% of the victimization effect. Second, re-estimating using predicted victimization (based on pre-SC demographics) yields precise null effects, indicating the increase is not driven by compositional change. Third, results are stable when restricting to respondents present at all survey waves or using individual fixed effects.

Q: Could the reporting decline be mechanical — reflecting a change in the types of crimes committed rather than behavioral change? A: The authors test this by constructing predicted reporting rates using pre-SC incident characteristics. The largest alternative estimate is -1.45 percentage points, over six times smaller than the estimated main reporting effect of 9.5 percentage points, ruling out crime composition change as the primary explanation. Results also hold when focusing on always-respondents and using individual fixed effects, ruling out entry of low-reporting individuals into the survey.

Q: How robust are the results to alternative empirical strategies? A: Results are robust to including states that resisted SC (with somewhat smaller magnitudes as expected), alternative population cutoffs, TWFE specifications, the Borusyak et al. (2021) and Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) estimators (which yield larger point estimates), a triple-differences specification using non-Hispanics as an additional control group, and the inclusion of time-varying unemployment rates. The dynamic event-study plots show parallel pre-trends across all specifications.

Q: What are the policy implications of the null effect on aggregate victimization? A: The authors estimate that the policy ruled out declines in aggregate victimization larger than 3.3%, indicating SC did not generate meaningful improvements in aggregate public safety. This contradicts the stated mission of immigration enforcement agencies. The findings imply that policies targeting immigrant communities can generate public safety costs through trust erosion that outweigh any deterrence or incapacitation benefits.

Secure Communities (SC): A federal program launched in 2008 requiring automatic sharing of fingerprints from local jail bookings with the Department of Homeland Security, enabling identification of unauthorized immigrants among local arrestees and triggering ICE detainer requests; the largest expansion of interior immigration enforcement in U.S. history.

Chilling effect: The mechanism by which immigration enforcement raises the perceived cost of contacting law enforcement for immigrant victims and witnesses — through fear that they, a family member, or neighbor will be detained or deported — thereby reducing willingness to report crimes independently of any change in underlying criminality.

Victimization rate: The likelihood that an individual is the victim of a crime in a given period, measured via the NCVS independently of whether the crime was reported to police; the paper’s primary measure of public safety.

Reporting rate: The likelihood that a criminal victimization is reported by the victim to the police, measured as a share of all crime incidents; distinct from victimization rate and central to the paper’s decomposition of reported crime into its two components.

Reported crime rate: The joint probability of being victimized and reporting the crime, analogous to measures available in administrative police data such as the FBI UCR; this outcome masks the opposing effects of SC on victimization and reporting.

Honored detainer: An ICE detainer request that results in a transfer of the arrested individual to ICE custody; the paper’s preferred measure of immigration enforcement intensity because it is available both before and after SC activation and is more directly linked to deportation actions than all detainer requests.

Decomposition of victimization increase: The paper’s procedure for quantifying the relative importance of the reporting-channel (reduced probability of apprehension) versus other SC-induced social and economic changes (unemployment, wages, female-headed households, male immigrant share) in explaining the rise in Hispanic victimization.