Assessing benefits, costs, and disparate racial impacts of confrontational proac...

Significance

Criminal justice policy is susceptible to controversy. Crime and policies to prevent it are inextricably tied to divergent beliefs among citizens about right and wrong, the protection of person and property, and the legacy of ill treatment of racial minorities by agents of the criminal justice system. This paper studies a model that helps to address one aspect of crime prevention policy, the use of confrontational proactive policing methods. These methods may have social benefits in crime reduction but costs in intrusion on the rights and privacy of innocent persons. The paper provides a structure for weighing these benefits and costs dispassionately, aiming to honor and achieve the sometime conflicting objectives of crime control policy in a democratic society.

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.

Footnotes

• ↵1C.F.M. and D.S.N. contributed equally to this work.

• ↵2To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: [email protected].

• Author contributions: C.F.M. and D.S.N. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.

• Reviewers: P.N., University of Cambridge; and S.R., University of California, Berkeley.

• The authors declare no conflict of interest.

• See Commentary on page 9231.

• This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1707215114/-/DCSupplemental.