The impact of police presence on drug-trade-related violence

Rio de Janeiro hosted two major sports events in a two-year period: the FIFA World Cup and the Summer Olympic Games. After the announcements of the city as the host of these events, the government launched the Favela Pacification Program. The program consists in the expulsion of drug-trafficking organizations from territories where they used to exert a monopoly on violence. The identification strategy used in this paper exploits the time and space variation in the deployment of police forces and the organized crime structure of criminal activity in Rio de Janeiro to evaluate the causal effect of the program on criminal activity. The results indicate that the program caused a displacement of drug-trade-related violence. We also find that the program caused a reduction in violence in pacified territories, but this result may be the consequence of contamination of the control group.