What is the Best Response? Examining the Impact of Police and Their Alternatives

We are grateful to Amna Akbar, Desmond Ang, Peter Arcidiacono, Pat Bayer, David Berger, Alec Brandon, Kevin Dano, Michael Dinerstein, Andrew Fan, Dalia Ghanem, Nate Hendren, Anjelica Hendricks, John Eric Humphries, Jacob Kaplan, Desire Kedagni, Illenin Kondo, John Macdonald, Matt Masten, Naomi Murakawa, Aurelie Ouss, Michael Pollman, Canice Prendergast, Roman Rivera, Evan Rose, Yotam Shem-Tov, Gabriela Solis, Ben Sprung-Keyser, Megan Stevenson, Atheendar Venkataramani, Marianna Yamamoto, Jonathan Zhang, and the Bellwether Collaborative. Special thanks to Ryan Smith and Keith Chadwell for providing feedback on HEART program. We also thank seminar participants Georgia State, Michigan Ford, Penn LDI, Vanderbilt, Mortality and Criminal Legal System Contact Conference at Cornell, and NBER Summer Institute. Iris Chang and Lily Levine provided outstanding research assistance. The study was approved by the IRB at Duke (IRB 2025-0376). The field experiment was pre-registered in the AEA RCT Registry (AEARCTR-0016060). We gratefully acknowledge financial support from J-PAL North America’s Social Policy Research Initiative and Arnold Ventures. This research received support from the Population Dynamics Research Infrastructure Program award to the Duke Population Research Center (P2C HD065563) at Duke University by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Any errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.