How police patrols reduced severe street harassment in India

More than half of women globally report experiencing street harassment and 82% actively avoid certain areas due to safety concerns. With such safety concerns, routine activities like commuting to work, shopping at markets, or picking up children from daycare become complex endeavours that require careful planning of when, where and how to travel. This constant vigilance creates a burden on women, who must remain perpetually alert during daily activities simply to protect themselves.

In most cities, women navigating public spaces face the persistent threat of sexual harassment—unwelcome sexual advances most often from unknown men. Tackling this issue is complex: it happens frequently, affects many women, and is notoriously difficult to track due to underreporting.

Sexual harassment has significant social and economic costs

The economic and social costs of harassment are substantial. The recent VoxDevLit on Female Labour Force Participation (Heath et al. 2024) highlights how awareness of potential violence against women reduces women’s participation in the workforce, as documented by Siddique (2020). Furthermore, Borker (2018) finds that young women sacrifice approximately 20% of their potential lifetime earnings by choosing lower quality colleges with safer travel routes.

Despite the pervasiveness of this issue, effective solutions for enhancing women's safety in public spaces remain limited. In India, where our study is focused, the Government has been funding women's safety initiatives through the Nirbhaya Fund since 2013, with particular emphasis on improving law enforcement responses. But we know little about what works and why. Our recent research (Amaral et al. 2024) examines the effectiveness of police patrols in combatting sexual harassment in public spaces in Hyderabad. We find that frequent and visible police presence in locations that are hotspots of harassment successfully reduces incidents of severe sexual harassment, such as unwanted touching and groping. This reduction is estimated to translate into an estimated economic benefit of INR 1.2 billion (US$14.3 million) for the city’s female college graduates, underscoring the profound economic and social gains that can result from targeted, data-driven public safety interventions. Our findings point to a replicable model that could transform public spaces into safer environments for women, with measurable economic returns for cities that prioritise gender-responsive urban safety policies.

The role of police presence on women’s safety in India

We partnered with the Hyderabad City Police to study their Safety, Health, and Environment (SHE) Teams programme. The SHE Teams programme uses hotspot policing to address sexual harassment in public spaces. While hotspot policing is one of the most widely used policing tools, it has not previously been used to target harassment specifically. We worked with the police to determine the most effective policing strategies for addressing harassment. First, we collaborated with the police to identify 350 hotspots or areas where women were at higher risk of harassment across the city, based on local knowledge and an analysis of past calls-for-service. Next, we randomly assigned each area to one of three experimental arms, as shown in Figure 1:

• Uniformed police patrols: In 100 hotspots, teams of officers in uniform patrolled the area.
• Undercover police patrols: In 100 hotspots, teams of undercover or plain clothed officers patrolled the areas.
• Business as usual policing: In 150 hotspots, no patrols from the SHE Teams were present.

In the uniformed and undercover areas teams of 2-3 officers conducted foot patrols for about 15-20 minutes, on average three times per week. The goal of the officers was to detect, apprehend and sanction perpetrators of sexual harassment.

Figure 1: Hotspots and experimental assignment in the city of Hyderabad

Note: The figures display the location of hotspots and the respective patrol areas within Hyderabad City Police jurisdiction. 

Measuring harassment in public spaces in Hyderabad

Measuring the prevalence of street harassment presents unique methodological challenges. The transient nature of these incidents, their frequency, the anonymity of perpetrators, and victims' reluctance to report through official channels or surveys make traditional measurement approaches ineffective. To address these limitations and evaluate the effectiveness of police interventions, we developed an innovative observational methodology using trained enumerators to document the harassment they observed hotspots. These observers worked concurrently with police patrols, though neither group was aware of the other's presence—a design that enabled us to precisely measure law enforcement's impact on harassment at a granular level. The results are striking. Over a four-month period, our enumerators documented over 10,000 harassment incidents, averaging one incident every 36 minutes. This high-frequency measurement approach also revealed that more than half of all victims responded to harassment by physically moving from the incident location, highlighting both the immediate behavioural impact of harassment and its role in restricting women's freedom of movement in public spaces.

The impact of police patrols in hot spot areas on harassment incidents 

1. Effectiveness of police visibility: Uniformed patrols led to a 27% reduction in severe harassment incidents, translating to 0.7 fewer victimisations per week per hotspot. In contrast, undercover police patrols did not change the incidence rate of harassment. We interpret this as evidence that police visibility works by deterring perpetrators of sexual harassment. 
2. Police visibility improves women’s mobility: The presence of uniformed officers also influenced women's reactions to harassment. Women in these hotspots were 30% less likely to leave the area in response to harassment, indicating that reduced severe harassment enabled greater mobility.
3. Police presence with stronger anti-harassment attitudes is important: While visible police patrols led to a change in severe harassment, we did not see improvement in women’s safety from mild forms of harassment (e.g. catcalling). To understand why, we invited police officers to view various videos of instances of sexual harassment and asked to complete a survey. When analysing the data we find that officers have a higher threshold for exerting effort in deterring mild forms of harassment and in their willingness to sanction these types of offenses. We also find that when police patrol teams have stronger anti-harassment attitudes, the incidence of mild harassment also diminishes when the police patrols are visible. The findings emphasise that police attitudes significantly influence the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing harassment.

We show that the decline in severe harassment is explained by the fact that the police were more likely to apprehend perpetrators of sexual harassment due to their increased presence in the harassment hotspots. However as the extent of harassment is so vast, visible policing was more effective than undercover policing because of the deterrence effect i.e. citizens have a very simple and straightforward way to observe changes toward offenders of sexual harassment in public spaces. In fact, we observe some evidence that citizens learn over time that police officers are there to target sexual harassment. This result is important since it shows that police credibility with respect to gender issues matters and can be used in a cost-effective manner.   

How implementing visible policing strategies can reduce harassment and have significant positive spillover effects

The study's findings highlight how police visibility and officer attitudes play a crucial role in combating sexual harassment in public spaces. Our research in Hyderabad demonstrates that implementing visible policing strategies, combined with efforts to transform underlying social attitudes, can significantly enhance women's safety and freedom of movement in urban areas. This improved security has far-reaching implications: we estimate that the reduction in severe harassment achieved through visible anti-harassment policing could generate an economic benefit of INR 1.2 billion (US$14.3 million) for Hyderabad's female college graduates. This projection stems from women being less likely to compromise their educational aspirations by choosing lower-quality institutions closer to home out of harassment concerns. The ripple effects of these interventions extend beyond immediate safety, fostering greater female participation in both higher education and the workforce.

References

Amaral, S, G Borker, N Fiala, A Kumar, N Prakash, and M M Sviatschi (2023), “Sexual harassment in public spaces and police patrols: Experimental evidence from urban India,” National Bureau of Economic Research, No. w31734.

Borker, G (2018), “Perceived risk of street harassment and college choice of women in Delhi,” VoxDev. Available at: https://voxdev.org/topic/education/perceived-risk-street-harassment-and-college-choice-women-delhi.

Heath, R, A Bernhardt, G Borker, A Fitzpatrick, A Keats, M McKelway, A Menzel, T Molina, and G Sharma (2024), “Female labour force participation,” VoxDevLit, 11(1): 1–43. Available at: https://voxdev.org/voxdevlit/female-labour-force-participation.

Siddique, Z (2020), “Does a fear of violence affect female labour supply in India,” VoxDev. Available at: https://voxdev.org/topic/labour-markets-migration/does-fear-violence-reduce-female-labour-supply-evidence-india.