Sanctuary Jurisdictions in Florida Do Not Have Higher Crime Rates

Florida state Senator Joe Gruters (R‑Sarasota) introduced a bill (SB 168) in 2019 to ban so-called sanctuary jurisdictions in Florida and require local governments to cooperate fully with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A sanctuary jurisdiction is any state or local government that has a policy to comply with fewer than 100 percent of ICE detainers, which are ICE requests for the local government to release an arrested or imprisoned person into ICE custody for deportation. Local and state governments still prosecute illegal immigrants for crimes in sanctuary jurisdictions, but they only turn some illegal immigrants over to ICE if they are charged with or convicted of serious crimes.

The complaint over sanctuary jurisdictions is that they result in increased crime, but the limited research on the topic finds no increase in crime in sanctuary jurisdictions relative to non-sanctuary jurisdictions. We decided to do our best using simple methods to look at how sanctuary jurisdiction policies affect crime in Florida. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, Clay and Alachua counties in Florida will not honor ICE detainers without a judicial order or a criminal warrant. They enacted their policies in December 2014 and September 2015, respectively.

To compare whether adopting anti‐​detainer sanctuary policies impacted crime in Alachua and Clay counties, we draw on crime data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) Return A file. The Return A is the gold standard in economics and criminal justice literature crime data. Since these data are provided at the reporting agency level, we aggregate the crime counts up to the county-year level to reflect the extent of geographic coverage for each anti‐​detainer policy. As a basis for comparison, we identify counties neighboring Alachua and Clay as counterfactual counties using the county adjacency file from the National Bureau for Economic Research. We then compute county crime rates per 100,000 to compare crime rates between and across counties. For illustrative purposes, we compute an “adjacent counties” counterfactual crime rate as the sum of all crimes in surrounding counties normalized by their combined population.

Figure 1 shows that the crime rates in Clay and Alachua counties had fallen like in their neighboring counties, except for Baker County, from 2010 through 2017. If sanctuary policies in Clay and Alachua counties affected crime rates, there is no obvious indication in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Change in Crime Rates in Sanctuary Counties and Neighboring Counties. Sources: FBI, Census Bureau TIGER/​Line, and Center for Immigration Studies.

Figure 2 displays the crime rates in Alachua County relative to neighboring counties before and after the sanctuary policy was enacted. The crime rates were roughly parallel before the enactment of the sanctuary policy and stayed parallel afterward, meaning that the policy change likely did not affect crime rates. The results look nearly identical if property or violent crime rate trends are compared separately.

Figure 2. Crime Rates in Alachua and Neighboring Counties. Sources: FBI and Center for Immigration Studies.

Figure 3 displays the crime rates in Clay County relative to neighboring counties. The crime rates were roughly parallel before Clay County enacted its sanctuary policy and remained roughly parallel afterward. Again, the enactment of a sanctuary policy in Clay County had no effect on crime. More time after the enactment of the sanctuary policies and more rigorous statistical methods are required to analyze these effects for both Clay and Alachua Counties fully, but Figures 2 and 3 are pretty convincing on their own. The results look nearly identical if property or violent crime rate trends are compared separately.

Figure 3. Clay and Neighboring Counties Crime Rates. Sources: FBI and Center for Immigration Studies.

The small numbers of non-citizens in Alachua and Clay counties could explain why there was no effect on crime. In 2017, only 5.2 percent of Alachua County’s population were non-citizens, and 2.5 percent of Clay County’s population were non-citizens. In different jurisdictions like Miami-Dade County, where 23.3 percent of the population were non-citizens in 2017, the effect of sanctuary city policies might differ, although there is no evidence of that during the brief period when it had a sanctuary policy.

SB 168 was originally paired with a bill that would have mandated E‑Verify on the state level. E‑Verify is a government electronic eligibility for employment verification system where employers enter the identity information of new hires into a government website that then checks the information against government databases to see if they can legally work. The goal of E‑Verify is to exclude illegal immigrants from the workforce. E‑Verify doesn’t work well, but it may have increased crime in Arizona when that state government mandated it for all new hires. 

Florida had only two sanctuary jurisdictions in 2019, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, and it is unlikely to have many more in the coming years. Furthermore, crime rates in those counties did not rise relative to neighboring counties after they adopted their sanctuary policies. The effect of sanctuary policies on local crime rates is a subject screaming for more research, but the evidence so far shows that sanctuary policies don’t affect crime in Florida.

This is an update of a blog post that originally appeared at Cato at Liberty.