Evaluating a citizen security pilot in Honduras: The economic benefits of a much reduced murder rate

Motivation During the 2010s Honduras reported some of the highest rates of violent urban crime anywhere in the world. Before the 2010s, the government tried to control crime using heavy policing and sentencing (la mano dura), but with little apparent effect on alarming and rising rates of urban crime. This led to a switch to working with communities to make urban spaces safer, to change attitudes among young people vulnerable to perpetrating and suffering violent crime, and to encouraging secondary school students to remain in school. Purpose The article assesses the success of the 2013–2019 pilot, Ciudades Seguras (Safe Cities), in three large municipalities. The project aimed at integrating crime prevention, social investment and municipal capacity building across the national and subnational administrations. Approaches and methods The project was designed with no regard to impact evaluation, without an adequate baseline, without controls. Hence, we develop a simple ex‐post cost–benefit analysis (CBA) that updates an ex‐ante CBA. Our approach has two advantages: (1) it provides rigorous estimates of the project’s impacts from assessing counterfactuals, data, and plausible individual and social benefits; and (2) it helps assess the quality of the original ex‐ante CBA estimates. Findings Reliable data on project impact is incomplete. Two findings, however, are striking. In the three cities, homicides fell dramatically from more than 850 per annum to below 500, against a projection of rates rising to 900 per annum. The other is that, contrary to programme plans, school dropout rates actually increased. The value of fewer murders outweighed disappointments on school retention. The benefit–cost ratio is estimated to be 1.75, higher than the ex‐ante estimate of the project. The value of the pilot remains unchanged when we include calculations from incomplete and/or unreliable data on sexual violence, injuries, thefts, and school dropout. Policy Implications Two conclusions can be drawn from this article. First, that Ciudades Seguras achieved great success in reducing murder rates, showing how working with communities to make cities safer and changing attitudes and expectations can work, when heavier policing does not. Second, that it is possible to assess the economic benefits derived from such programmes, even when adequate measures for subsequent evaluation were not included in the design of the pilot. [Correction added on 20 May 2021, after initial online publication: Abstract section has been updated in this version.]