Economic approach to “de‐policing”

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Author: Emily Owens
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12413
• Date: 01 February 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12413

POLICY ESSAY

DE-POLICING AND THE HOMICIDE RAISE

Economic approach to “de-policing”

Emily Owens

University of California, Irvine

Correspondence

EmilyOwens, University of California, Irvine, 2311 Social Ecology II, Irvine CA 92697-7080.

Email:egowens@uci.edu

Academics and practitioners have long acknowledged that police face an “impossible mandate”

(Manning, 1977). On the one hand, police officers are charged with being warriors against crime. The

results of repeated opinion polls show that demand for police protection transcends social class and

race (Clegg & Usmani, 2017). Also, a substantial body of evidence demonstrates that hiring more

officers is an effective way to reduce crime (see Nagin, 2013, for a recent review). On the other hand,

officers must also be guardians who protect the citizens in the communities they serve. In a large body

of research, scholars suggest large social benefits to the “guardian” approach. People who believe

the police are trustworthy and “do the right thing” are more likely to be law abiding generally (Tyler,

2006 [1990]). In a growing number of studies, researchers have found evidence consistent with the

hypothesis that negative police encounters can cause physiological harm (Geller, Fagan, Tyler, &

Link, 2014) and can lead affected citizens to withdrawal from participation in economic and social

life (Brayne, 2014). Notably, survey evidence indicates that the public believes there is a trade-off

between crime reduction and how police treat community members (Tyler, 2001).

One way to frame the tension between the “aggressive warrior” and “protective guardian” is to

use the language of public policy and economics and point out that there are both costs and benefits

to aggressive policing, which Richard Rosenfeld and Joel Wallman (2019, this issue) conceptualize as

making arrests. One clear benefit of making an arrest is that it could reduce crime both by incapacitating

an offender and by deterring potential criminals (Levitt, 1998). One cost of the same action is the poten-

tial erosion of public trust in the police as a benevolent force, particularly if the arrest seems to be influ-

enced by racial animus on the part of the officer (Tyler, Fagan, & Geller, 2014). A “socially efficient”

arrest is therefore one that balances these costs and benefits, meaning that the additional crime-reducing

benefit of the arrest, at minimum, equals the cost in terms of diminished perceptions of police legiti-

macy. Manski and Nagin(2017) pointed out that this erosion of public trust can be a function of who is

being arrested and can easily be incorporated into the canonical Becker model of crime (Becker, 1968).

1WHEN ARE ARRESTS GOOD FOR SOCIETY?

An immediate insight from this economic framing is that if people view any further reduction in crime

as a low priority, then arrests that previously might have been sociallyefficient will no longer provide

more crime-reducing benefit than legitimacy cost. This result implies that the historic crime drop itself

Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:77–80. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2019 American Society of Criminology 77