Citation

Manski CF, Nagin DS. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2017; 114(35): 9308-9313.

Affiliation

Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1707215114

PMID

28739928

Abstract

Effective policing in a democratic society must balance the sometime conflicting objectives of public safety and community trust. This paper uses a formal model of optimal policing to explore how society might reasonably resolve the tension between these two objectives as well as evaluate disparate racial impacts. We do so by considering the social benefits and costs of confrontational types of proactive policing, such as stop, question, and frisk. Three features of the optimum that are particularly relevant to policy choices are explored: (i) the cost of enforcement against the innocent, (ii) the baseline level of crime rate without confrontational enforcement, and (iii) differences across demographic groups in the optimal rate of enforcement.

Language: en

Keywords

criminal justice policy; deterrence; policing; social welfare