The Rule of Law Index, developed by the World Justice Project, measures adherence to universal rule of law principles across countries. Utilizing data from over 214,000 households and 3,500 experts, the Index evaluates and ranks nations based on key indicators such as government accountability, corruption, transparency, fundamental rights, open government, civic engagement, security, business regulation, and the effectiveness of regulatory, criminal, and civil justice systems. These indicators include order and security and criminal justice, which are directly related to crime and law enforcement capacity.

This paper analyzes reporting errors in crime data to see how they impact econometric estimates, particularly of the key relationship between inequality and crime. It shows that cross-country crime statistics are affected by differences in reporting and recording practices, which can bias estimated relationships between crime and explanatory variables. The authors highlight that institutional factors, including law enforcement capacity and willingness to record crime, influence observed crime rates across countries and may confound causal interpretations.

The report summarizes multiple empirical studies on police strength and crime. It notes that "Levitt (2004) estimates that increases in the number of law enforcement officers between 1991 and 2001 resulted in a 5–6 percent reduction in crime rates nationally." It further reports that a Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis of COPS hiring grants "found that after controlling for a wide range of other factors, the COPS hiring grants had a statistically significant negative impact on crime rates," with a 1 percent increase in police force size decreasing property crime by 0.25 percent and violent crime by 1 percent. The report also states: "research that has examined instances where there is a complete absence of police—due to strikes, for example—has consistently shown that crime rates skyrocket in these situations."

The FBI's Crime Data Explorer (CDE) aims to provide transparency, create easier access, and expand awareness of criminal, and noncriminal, law enforcement data. It contains nationwide data reported by law enforcement agencies, including reported crime incidents, arrests, and police employee data. The platform illustrates that measured crime levels depend on what agencies report, making it a primary source for understanding how law enforcement practices and reporting standards influence official crime statistics, but it does not assert that weak enforcement causes crime.

The World Justice Project defines the rule of law as a durable system of laws, institutions, norms, and community commitment that delivers accountability, just laws, open government, and accessible justice. These general principles are further developed into nine factors and 47 sub-factors in the WJP Rule of Law Index. The nine factors are: Constraints on Government Powers, Absence of Corruption, Open Government, Fundamental Rights, Order and Security, Regulatory Enforcement, Civil Justice, Criminal Justice, and Informal Justice. The Order and Security factor looks at how well the society ensures the security of persons and property, while the Criminal Justice factor evaluates the effectiveness and fairness of the criminal justice system, including its capacity to investigate and prosecute crimes.

The WJP Rule of Law Index is the world’s leading source for original, independent data on the rule of law. Now covering 142 countries and jurisdictions, the Index relies on more than 149,000 household surveys and 3,400 legal practitioner and expert surveys to measure how the rule of law is experienced and perceived worldwide. The index includes factors such as Order and Security and Criminal Justice, which capture levels of crime, violence, and effectiveness of law enforcement and justice institutions, allowing comparisons across countries and over time.

An analysis of UCR and NCVS rates from 1973 to 1992 suggests that the increase in UCR violent crimes observed during those years was attributable, in part, to increased police productivity. Thus, it is possible that a decrease in police productivity, such as a decline in staffing or proactive enforcement activities, may hinder law enforcement’s ability to record crime. The report emphasizes that crime trends reflect both actual victimization and changes in law enforcement activity and reporting, complicating simple causal claims about weak enforcement causing crime.

Reviewing the empirical literature, the authors state: "Taken together, the empirical literature provides strong evidence that deploying additional officers to narrow geographic areas can substantially reduce crime in those areas." Their own difference-in-differences analysis of extra university-funded police finds that "the extra police provided by the university generated approximately 45-60 percent fewer crimes in adjacent city blocks" and concludes: "Our results paint a fairly consistent picture: more police protection is associated with less crime. This effect is statistically and practically significant across nearly all crime categories."

According to Soerjono Soekanto, several factors influence law enforcement in efforts to tackle crime, namely: a) the factor of the law itself; b) the factor of law enforcement (officers), which is one of the keys to the success of crime control; c) the factor of facilities or infrastructure, such as trained personnel, good organization, adequate equipment, and sufficient finances; d) the factor of society, where the most important part in determining law enforcement is the legal awareness of the community. The text explains that the lower the level of legal awareness in society, the more difficult it is to implement good law enforcement, which in turn hampers efforts to combat crime.

The WJP Rule of Law index assesses countries’ performance on the nine areas of: limits on government power, corruption, security, fundamental rights, open government, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, criminal justice, and informal justice. Scores are built from assessments of the general public (1,000 respondents per country) and local legal experts. The security and criminal justice dimensions are intended to capture how effectively a country prevents crime, ensures order and security, and investigates, prosecutes, and punishes criminal offenses.

Research has shown that upwards of 50 percent of all crime is concentrated in a very small percentage of places. Studies that addressed many methodological flaws in older work have found greater evidence in favor of increases in the number of officers impacting crime rates. For example, Levitt (2004) estimates that increases in the number of law enforcement officers between 1991 and 2001 resulted in a 5–6 percent reduction in crime rates nationally, and other research finds that each additional officer results in approximately 24 fewer crimes. The report concludes, however, that it is difficult to reliably demonstrate a causal relationship between the economy, the number of police, and crime, warning against attributing crime levels solely to police strength or budgets.

This review of empirical evidence on police practices notes that "Extensive research suggest that hot-spots policing generates small but noteworthy reductions in crime, which diffuse into areas immediately surrounding the targeted hot spots." It highlights that a large body of research "does indicate that targeted, focused, problem-oriented, place-based, proactive, and community-centric approaches can be effective in reducing crime," while also acknowledging that evidence is limited to certain parts of the world and that not every intervention shows statistically significant effects.

The article reviews "big data" applications in policing and notes that predictive tools can help law enforcement deploy resources more efficiently, "ultimately helping prevent and intercept crimes, and thus reducing crime rates." It cites Mohler et al. (2015), who found that using an algorithm (PredPol) to direct patrols "led to small but statistically significant reductions in crime volume." At the same time, the review observes that "most violent and property crime clearance rates have remained fixed, and homicide clearance rates have declined," indicating that increased data capacity has not necessarily strengthened core law enforcement effectiveness in solving crimes.

The study states that the main obstacles to law enforcement in Indonesia lie in the lack of integrity and professionalism among law enforcement officials, inconsistencies in legal substance, and the generally low level of legal culture in society. It notes that ineffective law enforcement institutions due to corruption, unprofessionalism, and lack of independence create weak and ineffective law enforcement, thereby creating room for legal violations to continue.

The Rule of Law Index, produced by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), combines information on the compliance with the judiciary and high court, independence of lower and higher courts, respect of the executive for the constitution, rigorous and impartial public administration, transparent laws with predictable enforcement, access to justice, judicial accountability, judicial corruption, public sector corruption, and executive corruption. The question underlying the index is: To what extent are laws transparently, independently, predictably, impartially, and equally enforced, and to what extent do the actions of government officials comply with the law? This composite measure is used to compare rule of law strength across countries and can be related statistically to other indicators such as homicide rates or other crime statistics in cross-country research.

We found no evidence suggesting that community policing has an impact on reducing disorders, drug sales, or property crime, but it does have an impact on reducing violent crimes. Across the studies included in the meta-analysis, community policing was associated with small but statistically significant reductions in violent crime and improvements in police legitimacy. The findings suggest that certain forms of law enforcement engagement and strategy can reduce some types of crime, but the evidence does not support a simple claim that weak law enforcement broadly causes crime.

In testimony analyzing local effects of federal immigration enforcement policies, the authors report that adoption of sanctuary jurisdiction (SJ) policies "decreases violent crime incidents by 17.9 per 100,000 residents per year per county." They explain that this reduction is "driven primarily by decreases in aggravated assaults" and interpret the results as supporting "the argument that increased trust in local law enforcement outweighs the cost of releasing potential repeat offenders." Conversely, they find that policies obliging cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE (detainer policies) "lead to increases in crime rates."

The World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index provides original, impartial data on how the rule of law is experienced by the general public in 102 countries around the globe. The WJP Rule of Law Index 2015 relies on over 100,000 household and 2,400 expert surveys to measure how the rule of law is experienced in practical, everyday situations by ordinary people around the world. Performance is assessed using 44 indicators across 8 categories, including Order and Security and Criminal Justice, which reflect the prevalence of crime and the effectiveness of law enforcement and criminal justice institutions.

Based on data analysis, the indicators of weak law enforcement in Indonesia can be concluded as follows: 1) Corruption. The high level of corruption in various law enforcement agencies hampers the objectivity and integrity of the legal process. Corrupt officials tend to abuse power for personal gain, harming justice. 2) Weak judicial system. 3) Law enforcement as a political commodity, resulting in discriminatory law enforcement. These conditions are associated with recurring cases that show injustice in law enforcement in Indonesia over the last five years.

Written by an expert in the field of law enforcement, this book covers the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of approaches including crime-specific, problem-oriented, and Compstat-style policing. Parallel findings from two differently constituted Compstat programs on two different continents provide evidence that the primary component of the Compstat model is focusing, not broken windows enforcement, and the primary impact is on property crime. The research center’s materials indicate that some enforcement strategies can affect crime rates, but they also highlight that law enforcement is only one factor among many that shape crime patterns.

The World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index is the world's leading source for original rule of law data. It evaluates and ranks countries across key rule of law indicators, including checks on government powers, corruption, fundamental rights, open government, security, and the functioning of regulatory, criminal, and civil justice systems. In its description of the index, WJP notes that research shows that where the rule of law is stronger, so is peace, health, education and the economy, implying an association between stronger rule of law (including effective criminal justice and security) and lower levels of violence and crime.

Law enforcement can play a key role in reducing and solving serious crime, but departments should avoid the harms of overpolicing and focus on the few people driving the majority of serious crime by improving crime clearance rates, building better data collection and sharing strategies, and creating community-led collaborations that foster mutual trust. Leaders at all levels of government should prioritize community-based prevention strategies that address underlying conditions such as access to health care, housing, neighborhood revitalization, and economic opportunity. The report argues that effective public safety depends on both accountable law enforcement and broader social and economic policies, rather than attributing crime simply to weak governmental enforcement.

This empirical study examines factors influencing crime rates and reports: "The findings indicate that increased government expenditure on policing has a significant negative impact on crime rates, suggesting that stronger law enforcement efforts contribute to crime reduction." The analysis controls for other socioeconomic variables to isolate the effect of policing expenditure, providing evidence that government law enforcement capacity, as proxied by spending, is linked to crime levels.

This article explains that there are many factors causing law enforcement in Indonesia to be weak, with the main problem lying in several influencing factors. From the five factors mentioned (law, law enforcement officers, facilities, society, and culture), weaknesses in the legal system also hinder law enforcement. Many articles in laws are still vague or overlapping, making them difficult to apply. However, the article emphasizes that the primary factor in weak law enforcement lies in law enforcement officials themselves, namely weak morals of law enforcers, and also low public legal awareness, where society often ignores law and does not fully support law enforcement officers.

The study, using a socio-legal approach, finds that low integrity among law enforcement officers significantly affects the decline of public trust, which in turn weakens the legitimacy and effectiveness of law in society. It explains that low integrity can trigger abuse of authority and injustice in the application of law. From the perspective of sociology of law, weak legal culture among officers leads to inconsistent and discriminatory law enforcement practices, which undermine the legitimacy of the law and reduce public trust, making the public less open in reporting crimes and cooperating with officers.

Explore rule of law rankings for 143 countries in the WJP Rule of Law Index. The global insights dashboard presents scores on the nine factors, including Order and Security and Criminal Justice. Countries with lower scores on these factors tend to have higher levels of crime, insecurity and weaker law enforcement, while countries with higher scores generally enjoy greater personal security and more effective criminal justice systems. The tool allows researchers to correlate rule of law factor scores with external crime indicators such as homicide rates or victimization surveys.

National surveys, as well as studies of specific jurisdictions, reveal disparities in the outcomes of police stops. The tensions resulting from excessive, intrusive, and violent police encounters diminish the ability of police to gain the cooperation that they need to identify crime suspects, and can contribute to retaliatory violence in communities. The report notes that frayed police-community relationships contribute to lower reporting of crime to authorities and undermine public safety, showing that overly aggressive or discriminatory law enforcement can itself be linked to certain crime dynamics, rather than simply preventing crime.

This policy report on California cities finds that "higher per capita police spending and staffing levels were positively correlated with crime rates," meaning that departments with more law enforcement resources had higher crime rates. It notes that "increased police spending and staffing did not correlate with improved clearance rates" and that both spending and officer/staff numbers were "negatively associated with clearance rates," suggesting that more resources have not led to more effective crime-solving. The authors conclude that "simply increasing police budgets and personnel does not lead to more effective crime-solving or safer communities."

The commentary identifies several "false narratives" about recent U.S. homicide increases and argues that "soft-on-crime policies and practices are not credible diagnoses for recent increases in homicide." It notes that "cities with progressive prosecutors have seen a range of homicide counts" and that research suggests "progressive prosecutors have had no detectable effect on rates of major crimes, including homicide." It also states that studies of bail reform show "either no impact on crime rates or an increase in public safety after implementing bail reform," and that a review of law enforcement funding indicates "increased police funding does not result in decreased crime."

This paper concludes that indicators of weak law enforcement in Indonesia include: 1) corruption in law enforcement institutions, which hampers objective and fair legal processes; 2) a weak judicial system; 3) political intervention in legal cases; 4) law enforcement as a political commodity resulting in discriminatory practices; 5) lack of education and training for law enforcement officers. These weaknesses cause the main goal of law to realize justice for society not to be achieved and allow violations and injustices to persist.

This article synthesizes empirical work on the relationship between police workforce size and crime. It reports that "although the findings are not consistent in all set-ups, the studies generally found a negative correlation between police size and crime levels," citing Kovandzic and colleagues and others. At the same time, it emphasizes that results vary depending on context and methodology, indicating that simply having a larger police workforce does not uniformly determine crime outcomes across all settings.

The present paper aims to address this need through its initial evaluation of the Pennsylvania DMC Youth-Law Enforcement Curriculum in Philadelphia – a manualized training program designed to improve attitudes, perceptions, and understanding between law enforcement officers and young people, with the ultimate goal of behavior change facilitating more amicable interactions between these two groups and reduced racial and ethnic disparities in interaction quality and arrest rates. The study finds that changing law enforcement behavior and relationships can influence arrest patterns and disparities, suggesting that how enforcement is carried out matters for crime and justice outcomes, but it does not claim that weak enforcement is the root cause of crime.

This systematic study on weak law enforcement in Indonesia argues that the legal system is still weak, as seen from the failure to achieve the main purpose of law, namely justice for all citizens. It describes problems such as the dominance of money in law enforcement, law enforcement as a political commodity, discriminatory enforcement, and inadequate work competence that encourages corrupt practices among police personnel. The article emphasizes that the effectiveness of law enforcement depends on three elements of the legal system: legal structure, legal substance, and legal culture; weaknesses in these elements result in ineffective law enforcement and encourage ongoing violations.

The WJP Rule of Law Index is an invaluable tool for advancing rule of law reforms, global development, and business investment around the globe. It measures countries’ adherence to the rule of law across eight factors: Constraints on Government Powers, Absence of Corruption, Open Government, Fundamental Rights, Order and Security, Regulatory Enforcement, Civil Justice, and Criminal Justice. The Order and Security factor includes indicators on crime, such as whether people feel safe, whether crime is effectively controlled, and whether violence is limited, while the Criminal Justice factor includes indicators on the effectiveness of law enforcement, the criminal investigation system, and the impartiality and absence of corruption in criminal courts.

This article identifies several main factors as causes of weak law enforcement in Indonesia: corruption, political intervention, structural weaknesses in law enforcement institutions, lack of professionalism, and low legal awareness in society. It notes that high levels of corruption in law enforcement agencies obstruct objective and integrity-based legal processes, while political intervention often influences case handling, resulting in decisions that do not reflect justice and open opportunities for violations to continue.

Operation Cross Country is the FBI's annual law enforcement action focused on recovering underage victims of prostitution and drawing the public's attention to the problem of sex trafficking. The coordinated enforcement operation involves federal, state, and local partners and has resulted in the recovery of hundreds of child victims and the arrest of numerous traffickers and pimps. This example illustrates how targeted, strong law enforcement initiatives can disrupt specific criminal markets, but it is a sectoral intervention rather than evidence that crime overall is caused by weak enforcement.

In a public statement, Komnas HAM (Indonesia's National Human Rights Commission) observes that the practice of fair law enforcement that fulfills the rights of every citizen in Indonesia is still not optimal. The commission highlights that there are still many human rights violations and cases where law enforcement does not provide justice for victims, reflecting weaknesses in the enforcement system and government responsibility in upholding the law.

This law review article explores how big data is changing police capacity and notes that "important empirical questions on local law enforcement agency capacity remain insufficiently understood." It underscores that, despite expanded data tools, "we know relatively little about whether the police have increased efficiency and improved fairness in their daily operations" and calls for better measures of local law enforcement capacity to link organizational strength to crime outcomes.

The text explains that law enforcement is an effort by authorities to guarantee legal certainty, order, and legal protection. It also notes that individuals who experience injustice or weak law enforcement will try in various ways, implying that the inability of the state to enforce law fairly and effectively can drive people to seek alternative, sometimes unlawful, means to achieve what they perceive as justice or protection.

In comparative politics and criminology literature, rule of law indices such as those produced by the World Justice Project and V-Dem are frequently used as proxies for the effectiveness and fairness of law enforcement and justice systems. Studies typically find that countries with higher rule of law scores tend to report lower levels of violent crime and homicide, even after controlling for income and inequality, although the relationship is not perfectly deterministic and crime is also influenced by social, economic, and cultural factors beyond law enforcement strength.