More police reduces crime

[kingrat]

Shocking, I know. But until recently, there was no statisticly significant evidence that police actually reduce crime. Generally, cities with more crime have more police. That fact makes it hard to tell if police reduce crime. In order to tell if police levels actually reduce crime, you need to remove the cause and effect. In other words, you need to find a period of time when police levels are increased for some reason other than increased crime. And that doesn't happen often. But 9/11 provided that. With the new terror alerts, some cities increased their police presence because the government terror alert went to Orange. In particular, Washington D.C. did. Alex Tabarrok went and studied crime rates when the alert level was Yellow (less police) and when it was Orange (more police). His study suggests that increasing police presence by 10% reduces crime by 4%. Because of the costs of each (crime is costlier than police) it's probably cost effective to start bumping up police presence significantly.

Paper can be found: http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/TerrorAlertProofs.pdf

Comments

[darkphoenixrisn.livejournal.com]

We already know that a police state can rather significantly reduce crime.

[wire-mother.livejournal.com]

the situation now is to discover the cost point at which increasing police presence does not provide a valuable decrease in crime rate.

also, as darkphoenixrisn touches on, there also comes a point at which liberty is significantly reduced. the question there is how to effectively factor that into an economic analysis. how much are liberties worth? that, i think, is a question better put to the political arena than the economic one, as the value of a particular liberty is one which is culturally decided.

[kingrat]

Economics is about how people value stuff. Some things are pretty easy to value, because they are easil traded for money. Other things are harder. Like the other question I posted last night. How much is life worth? Many people would say that a life is worth any cost. Similarly, how much is your right to speak freely worth to you? It's also not priceless. People trade some of it all the tme for employment. My employer constrains my speech on pain of unemployment. And it's a valuable trade. Most people also trade pieces of their free speech for friendship. They give up the right to mock the person in public on pain of loss of friendship.

Politics and economics cannot be separated.

[wire-mother.livejournal.com]

i agree with you to an extent. my separation of the two is to emphasize that economics is almost a science, in which it is fairly easy to measure demand and supply; politics, on the other hand, is the place in which we determine demand and supply of intangibles, such as the right to speak freely. the value of that varies so widely from person to person and situation to situation that it requires more art than science to estimate the value for purposes of policy.

i don't think that i mean to make a hard and fast distinction here, of course, but rather a temporary one for the limited purposes of this specific comment.

[kingrat]

The $64,000 dollar question then is, what difference does it make whether you call it politics or economics?

[wire-mother.livejournal.com]

in this case, to differentiate between an artificial means of setting prices (conscious consensus) vs. a natural means (largely unconscious market forces). it is of limited use, but sometimes valuable, to make the distinction, i think.