A 2003 police organization reform in South Korea led to the consolidation of many local police boxes into fewer but larger patrol stations. The expectation was that such consolidation would allow police to utilize its limited resources in a more flexible and efficient way. In this study, we investigate the impact of this reform on crime by exploiting the variation in the extent of police box consolidation across South Korea. Our estimation results indicate that the areas more strongly affected by the consolidation have experienced a notable increase in crime, especially sexual assault and assault. Moreover, we find evidence that the police box consolidation has had a disproportionately higher impact on crime in rural areas, where the distribution of police boxes was sparser than in urban areas. These findings suggest that varying allocations of police resources can have an important impact on crime, even without a significant change in the overall level of police resources.

2003 年韩国的警察组织改革导致许多地方派出所合并为更少但更大的巡逻站。期望这种合并将使警察能够以更灵活和更有效的方式利用其有限的资源。在这项研究中，我们通过利用韩国各地警察局合并程度的变化来调查这项改革对犯罪的影响。我们的估计结果表明，受整合影响更大的地区的犯罪率显着增加，尤其是性侵犯和性侵犯。此外，我们发现有证据表明，警察箱整合对农村地区的犯罪产生了不成比例的更高影响，农村地区的警察箱分布比城市地区稀疏。