Having More Think Tanks in Your City Correlated with Lower Crime?

According to a 2017 study by three New York University scholars, having more nonprofits (including think tanks) in a community is correlated with a stronger social fabric and lower crime.

Here is more:

Largely overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on the crime decline is a long tradition of research in criminology and urban sociology that considers how violence is regulated through informal sources of social control arising from residents and organizations internal to communities. In this article, we incorporate the “systemic” model of community life into debates on the U.S. crime drop, and we focus on the role that local nonprofit organizations played in the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s. Using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofit formation, we estimate the causal effect on violent crime of nonprofits focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities. Drawing on a panel of 264 cities spanning more than 20 years, we estimate that every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.

Here is the full study, and here is a review of it.

DC Think Tanker Murdered

This is from the Washington Post:

59-year-old woman who was a senior official at a Washington think-tank was fatally stabbed in Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood as she was walking her dogs Friday night, police said.

Officers were called to the 600 block of W. University Parkway around 11 p.m. for a report of an injured person. Police said the woman, identified as Molly K. Macauley, was outside walking her dogs when she was stabbed by an unknown assailant.

Macauley was the vice president for research and a senior fellow with Resources for the Future (RFF) in Washington. She first joined the organization in 1993. She was an adjunct economics professor at Johns Hopkins University for nearly 20 years.

Here are some reactions, including from former RFF president Phil Sharp (who just retired several days ago and who is being replaced by Richard Newell), and RFF press secretary Dave Cohen.

Here is a statement from RFF, which includes an email excerpt from interim president Linda Fisher.

Some of Ms. Macauley's work at RFF, which was founded in 1952 and became the first think tank devoted exclusively to natural resources and environmental issues, can be found here.

RFF, which has a budget of about $13 million and 77 researchers/staff, was just ranked as the 34th best think tank in the United States and the world's 11th best energy and resources policy think tank.  It was also ranked as the world's 16th best environmental policy think tank.