streetlamp: Panel Econometrics for the Effect of Police Stop and Search on Recorded Crime

streetlamp builds an area-by-month panel of recorded crime in England and Wales from the data.police.uk bulk archive, attaches stop and search intensity as a treatment variable, and provides estimators for evaluating policing interventions. It is about what stops achieve, not who is stopped: it never computes an ethnic disparity measure and reads stop and search files only to count stops by area and month.

Design principles

• Every panel carries a panel contract recording provenance, coverage, LSOA vintage and treatment definition. Estimators read it and refuse or warn when their assumptions are violated.

• "Force did not submit" is never a zero.

• Anti-social behaviour is not a crime: it is kept in a separate series and excluded from crime totals by default.

• Treatment effects are reported with the identifying assumption named in the output, and every estimator ships with a placebo or pre-trend diagnostic.

• No network access during R CMD check, tests or examples.

Data attribution

Recorded crime, outcomes and stop and search counts derive from data.police.uk, and geography from the Office for National Statistics Open Geography Portal, both published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Bank holidays derive from GOV.UK. See inst/NOTES/data_sources.md in the package sources for what was verified and when.

See also

Useful links:

• https://github.com/BlackThrive/streetlamp

• https://blackthrive.github.io/streetlamp/

• Report bugs at https://github.com/BlackThrive/streetlamp/issues

Author

Maintainer: Mustapha Wasseja muswaseja@gmail.com

Authors:

• Souci Frissa

• Sarah Hamed

Other contributors:

• Black Thrive Global [copyright holder, funder]