About the event: Governments often impose oversight of the police. Proponents argue that oversight curbs bad behavior, while critics counter that it sparks harmful backlash. We provide evidence from the staged rollout of a new code of criminal procedure in Colombia, which introduced judicial oversight of arrests. Judicial oversight caused a 40% drop in the number of arrests, we find, and a simultaneous improvement in arrest quality. Arrests for low-level crimes like vandalism plummeted, while arrests for serious crimes (like homicide) did not decline. Colombia thus reversed the hemisphere-wide run-up in policing of minor offenses, without police backlash and likely without causing a major crime wave.

About the speaker: Dorothy Kronick is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, U.C. Berkeley. She is a political scientist studying crime, policing, and democracy in contemporary Latin America. Her research on these topics has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and Science, among other outlets. Prior to joining GSPP, she was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania; prior to that, she received her PhD from Stanford University.

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