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Abstract
The volunteer programme ‘Night Ravens’ (NR) was founded in Sweden in 1987 and has, over the years, developed into a Scandinavian concept covering large areas of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The NR programme is a crime prevention initiative with adults walking the streets at night in identifiable ‘uniforms’ in areas with high activity. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of the NR programme in Denmark based on a volunteer set-up with a less intrusive approach to situational crime prevention than, for instance, hot spot policing. The analyses are based on a longitudinal data set containing socio-demographic information on all 585 postcode districts in Denmark and quarterly records of six different categories of reported crimes in the years 2001–2010.We apply a difference-in-difference design and compare development in crime rates in districts with NR organizations to districts without NR organizations. The results show no difference in the crime rates between Danish postcode districts with and without the NR programme. Hence, we cannot identify positive effects of situational crime prevention when evaluating this Scandinavian volunteer programme with a more informal guardianship.
Acknowledgements
The members of the advisory board, Eskil Heinesen and the anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged for their valuable comments. We also thank the Danish National Police for providing access to the data sets on reported crimes in postcode districts, and the head office of the NR programme for contacting the NR organizations and supplying us with essential information.
Notes
1 Routine Activity Theory has previously been applied in a number of studies evaluating the guardian component (see examples in Cullen & Agnew, Citation2010).
2 The data set from Statistic Denmark containing records of postcode districts is limited to 2001 and the following years, which restricts the analyses to the years 2001–2010, even though it would have been relevant to include records of previous years as the NR programme was introduced in some districts in Denmark as early as 1998.
3 The national evaluation of the NR programme in Denmark included qualitative studies of the NR programme with field trips and participant observations in 14 different local NR organizations across the country (Larsen et al., Citation2013).
4 It would have been interesting to perform additional analyses with a data set limited to either charges or convictions of offenders aged 15–20, but the information was not available to us for the 585 postcode districts.
5 Information on the start and end date for each of the 198 different districts with an NR programme running in the years 2001–2010 was collected from the national head office of the NR organizations and validated by a survey to the chairpersons of the active NR organizations in the spring 2012 (Larsen & Olsen, Citation2013).
6 Four districts with NR organizations established in 2011 and 2012 are included in the analyses as control districts.
7 We refer readers interested in a more formal and detailed exposition of the DID method to Lechner (Citation2011).
8 The traditional formulation consists of the comparison of groups observed in two periods where one group is treated in the second period. The regression model includes a dummy variable for after and before treatment, a dummy variable for whether the unit belongs to the treated group and an interaction term between these two dummy variables. The parameter of interest is the point estimate of the interaction terms (Angrist & Pischke, Citation2009).
9 Report rates are, for example, around 40% for violent crimes, though they have increased in Denmark from 1995/1996 to 2005/2008 (Balvig & Kyvsgaard, Citation2009).