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Do searches on Google help in deterring property crime? Evidence from Indian states

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Abstract

Crime is a major social problem in most developed and developing countries. It induces a social, economic, and psychological impact on the victim. Over the last few decades, India has also witnessed an increasing trend in crime rates. The majority of these crimes are property-related. This study aims to examine the relationship between online preventive searches on Google and the reduction in property crimes in the states of India. We use Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood estimation to analyze the panel dataset for four states on monthly frequency for the period 2017 to 2020. Our results indicate that preventive searches on Google are significantly related to reduced property crimes like Burglary, Robbery, and Theft. A one percent increase in preventive Google searches reduces property crimes by 0.37–0.60%. “Target Hardening” and “Formal Social Control” appear to be the highly correlated preventive inquiries, while “Surveillance” appear to be the least correlated. Our findings indicate that personal precautions are a much more reliable measure for preventing property-related crime than community-level measures. Our result remains robust for both the socially less progressive and highly progressive states. This study contributes to policy discussions by taking a new perspective, providing novel empirical evidence, and contributing to academia through its quantitative approach.

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Notes

  1. A detail explanation on Social Progressive Index is presented in the result section.

  2. Google Trends data is collected from https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=IN; accessed on August 24, 2021.

  3. Searches less than equal to five thousand are considered as zero. This is done to exclude generic searches of the search term, such as, searches for academic purposes—project and research writing.

  4. The Census of India survey of 2011 is the latest survey available for India.

  5. See Neyman and Scott (1948) for further discussion.

  6. For the terms grouped under the “Informal Social Control” and “Target Hardening,” we did not find much data. We, therefore, do not estimate Eq. (3) for “Informal Social Control” and “Surveillance Index.”.

  7. Assessing the cultural and occupational impact on searches and property crime are beyond the scope of this study.

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The author(s) received no financial support for the research, and/or publication of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economic Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India

    Sunny Bhushan

  2. Indian Institute of Management Ranchi, Ranchi, India

    Saakshi Jha

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  1. Sunny Bhushan
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  2. Saakshi Jha
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Contributions

Idea for the article: SB, literature search: SJ, data analysis: SB and SJ, drafted: SB and SJ, critical analysis: SB.

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Correspondence to Saakshi Jha.

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The authors express their gratitude to the Editor-in-chief, the Managing Editor, and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Amey Sapre for valuable suggestions, Sanjukta Basu for constructive initial discussions, and the participants of the 7th International Conference on Law and Economics held at Tamil Nadu National Law University, India.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 8, 9.

Table 8 Results of panel Granger-causality test
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Table 9 Unit root test results
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Bhushan, S., Jha, S. Do searches on Google help in deterring property crime? Evidence from Indian states. Qual Quant 58, 1255–1277 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-023-01694-9

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