From Alex Tabarrok,
More police on the street is one cause, among many, of lower crime. It’s important in the debate over better policing that we not lose sight of the value of policing. Given the benefits of reduced crime and the cost of police, it’s clear that U.S. cities are under policed (e.g. here and here). We need better policing–including changes in laws–so that we can all be comfortable with more policing.
You can lose your libertarian membership card for saying things like that. I’d be curious to see whether his commenters tried to stomp on him.
This is a topic where conservatives may have it right, and progressives and libertarians may have it wrong.
A moderate and spot on observation by Tabarrok.
But re. Dr. Kling’s parting observation: I could note (quibble, really) that progressives are not intellectually aligned with libertarians on the broad effectiveness of “policing” relative to its “costs”. I don’t think they believe the same when it comes to “policing” the type of social behavior they consider offensive. engaged by people they consider dangerous, and in the protection of victims they consider worthy. Oh, and then there is the whole “policing” that goes by the name of regulation…
Policing speech. Policing science. Policing comedy. Policing the criticism of incumbent politicians. Policing manspreading. Policing the content of your prayers, and your YA fiction, and your Halloween costume, and your hair.
Crime is a violation of the individual. Libertarians who ignore or dismiss the damage done by crime are pickers are choosers when it comes to individual rights. It’s good to see when one comes around to realizing this fact, its not just government that does violence.
Of course to hire enough police you have to make it a job they want to do. Baltimore can’t hire or retain police despite a dire need…wonder why.
You can’t be oppressed by a criminal. The rules are as follows: You can be oppressed by someone wearing a uniform, or a corporation with an imposing-looking corporate headquarters, or by the patriarchy, or by a bully on Twitter, or by someone with an opinion that offends you. But not by a criminal.
This is something of a chicken and egg problem. We have some communities that have law and order issues. We turn to locally staffed, managed and funded institutions to intervene.
Local control means local successes and local failures.
The trouble is that the important rules and restrictions of policing are hardly controlled by locals. Not necessarily a bad thing in all cases, but in no sense can one reasonably deny the reality of a very small role for local discretion.
And yet, just a few days ago, Alex posted on “Get Out of Jail Free” Cards given out by police departments. So, maybe crime goes down with more police as long as we don’t count the crimes/corruption committed by the police.
The money quote is at the end “We need better policing–including changes in laws–so that we can all be comfortable with more policing.”
He doesn’t ignore the fact that current policing isn’t great.
His work was based on the assumption that Washington D.C. terror alerts produce a valid natural experiment. That sounds pretty dubious to me.
The victims of crime are mostly poor people. Poor people are bigoted and hateful. Handy, that, since it means rich people don’t have to feel bad about their privileges. (“Rich people” is the correct term. Not progressives, and not the two or three libertarians discernible in grainy photographs that might have been fakes.)
But always and everywhere, the underlying problem is that rich people hate poor people. And of course at this point rich people say that poor people deserve to be hated. After all, poor people are anti-women, and poor people are Nazis, and poor people are transphobic white supremacist Nazis. Which is what rich people talk about when they don’t want to talk about how zoning laws hurt the poor, and segregated schools hurt the poor, and green energy policies hurt the poor.
Crime is just one example. True, homeowners are less likely to be robbed than renters. And homeowners, unsurprisingly, are less likely to think that law and order are both good things, and not a punchline, or a phrase that comes attached with permanent air quotes, pronounced with a heavy sneer.
The essential thing is that poor people deserve everything they get. Always remember that the poor don’t even exist for the rich except as a way of distinguishing themselves from other rich people. They’re pawns in a status game. What happens to them in real life might as well be taking place on Mars.
No, the commenters didn’t try to stomp him. Actually a very civil discourse in the comments. Give libertarianism a bit of credit, it is not a province populated exclusively by manichaean ideologues, like say Don Boudreaux. Once could argue that some of its strongest well springs are outside economics altogether and in the more nuanced understanding of good and evil evidenced by authors like Shelley and Milton:
Reason in man obscured or not obeyed
Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart passions catch the government
From reason and to servitude reduce
Man till then free.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/miltons-morality/article/2011211
I’ll stick up for Don Boudreaux.
He’s not a manichean when it comes to H.L. Mencken. (“A war would do us good. It would make us healthier in body, cleaner in mind.”)
He’s positively nuanced on the subject of H.L. Mencken. (“It is my hope and belief that this sick and bogus England will be given a good licking by the Deutsch, to the end that truth and health may prevail upon the earth.”)
Boudreaux does not himself believe that “a nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid,” made weak by “all the evils that a long peace nourishes,” become “too fat in their security.”
And heck, there’s a lot to be nuanced about when you celebrate and venerate and worship at the feet of H.L. Mencken. (“Convinced, after long and prayerful consideration, that the Germans are wholly right, and that they deserve to win, and that they will win, I go, as the saying is, the whole hog. That is to say, I swallow not only the Germans themselves, but also and more especially the Kaiser, and not only the Kaiser, but also the whole war machine.”)
No arguments against Mencken here. I may be completely misusing the term “manichean” but in general I use it to mean “having a tendency to see everything as either good or evil.” Boudreaux’s arguments are typically constructed so that he points out someone else’s bad point of view and contrasts it with his good point of view. Very reductionist arguments. Not really a lot of nuance in his writing even if he is actually right on a lot of what he says.
Seems like the benefits of policing, relative to the amount of policing might be a curve — like most things — no?
Every day I commute on a DC street that recently installed some of those photographic speeding cameras. Before they installed the cameras, the odds of getting a ticket for even serious speeding were very low. Now, they are essentially 100%.
Before, it was completely normal for all cars to speed at least 10 miles over the limit; I’m guessing thousands a day going too fast. Now, practically no one speeds at all, and I’m not even sure the detectors can pay for themselves in fines anymore, because the deterrence effect has been so profound.
There’s no good way to calculate the “increase in policing” here, but let’s say it’s about a factor of 100, even though the number of actual policeman-hours per week on that road has gone down by over three quarters because of automation. Meanwhile, the decrease in speeding is around 90%, though I don’t know about accidents and injuries or other hard to value items like people feeling safer using bikes or walking across the road knowing that all the cars can be relied upon to drive slowly, and the neighborhood becoming more desirable and real estate values going up as a result, and so forth.
So while the law of diminishing returns probably applies, it’s by no means clear with regard to policing where it really starts to bite or by how much. The reason is because when police presence and detection probabilities are low, all kinds of people have different thresholds for risk and lots of people are gambling differently.
When policing rises to the point where detection is guaranteed, then almost all gambling suddenly stops and it doesn’t take long for personal habits to dramatically change which can dramatically alter the character of entire neighborhoods when law-breaking shifts from seeming typical and normal to seeming aberrant and bizarre and really transgressive and foolish.
The way to increase policing to achieve these kinds of benefits is not by increasing the number of police or the number of hours they patrol, but by intelligently using cheap and inescapable technological surveillance to catch the criminals in the act every time and then use their digital trail to quickly track them down.
It’s conceivable that most serious crime – with a few important exceptions – will be a permanently solved problem in our lifetimes, and the only things that will significantly delay that result from arriving in certain countries are extraordinarily crime-tolerant political and legal environments.
More police on the street is one cause, among many, of lower crime.
Living in Southern California I remember increased policing started occurring after 1995 several years after the crime wave stopping (1995) so I a little dubious of the impact of policing here. (I believe the early 1970s drop in marriage and children mostly.) Although I can not completely disagree that policing has an impact.
1) Judging by the new Amazon store there is a lot more private security the last 28 years might be the true increase in policing. (Compare the video of Amazon store to what videotapes were in 1990.) Remember I bet your license plate is 50 – 100 different private security servers right now.
2) Another is simply crime does not pay much anymore. I know it was an Austin Powers gag that legal company made billions more than the evil empire, but it is true. Again, the new Amazon store, what could you steal profitably? A bunch of prepaid sandwiches? There is no money to take. Now just think what a convenience store in 1990 had in the register and safe?
(Note I don’t think mostly cashier-less stores are happening for awhile but like driverless cars they will happen.)
Sorry I think the drop of early marriage (under 23) in the early 1970s that impacted crime.
“This is a topic where conservatives may have it right, and progressives and libertarians may have it wrong.”
Well, conservatives have shown little interest in the “better policing” part, so I’ll still throw my hat in the ring with the libertarians.
It’s not either or. You actually can want both.
You can hold the police to account without completely writing off the victims of crime. (Meaning, if you read Tabarrok’s post, African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34.)
I don’t think libertarians have any particular position on the right number of police per capita. Libertarians do have big problems with police abuses (asset forfeiture, excessive force, no-knock SWAT raids, planting evidence, trumped up charges, lying under oath, the ‘thin blue line’, etc). Many conservatives seem more forgiving of all this as long as it’s done against people that the cops believe are ‘bad guys’.
Libertarians would be right if the community had a certain demographic makeup. But America’s average community doesn’t have that.
Please explain to us what that certain demographic makeup might be.
He means if prior waves of European immigration were made up entirely of farmers and not shepherds. Of Scandinavians and Germans, not Scots and Italians.
I really don’t think that particular question was something that anyone other than MattW can answer.
However, as someone who is half Italian and half German, I thought your answer was hilarious, so thanks!
He advocates that the police become social workers, at a much higher salary.
Who will pay? The non-criminals taxpayers know how to deal with uneducated police, they do not need social workers.
I may have previously recommended this book, but it’s worth repeating. It presents a balanced examination of policing and crime commission in a black L.A. community.
It also points out that when policing is withdrawn from a community, you get gang/warlord groups vying for power and revenues — just as tribal an environment as Afghanistan.
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, by Jill Leovy
http://a.co/5kSV6VC