The political economy of enforcer liability for wrongful police stops

Abstract

This article questions whether excessive policing practices can persist in an environment where law enforcement policies are subject to political pressures. Specifically, it considers a setting where the police decide whether to conduct stops based on the suspiciousness of a person's behavior and the potential liability for conducting a wrongful stop. We establish that the liability level that results in a voting equilibrium is smaller than optimal, and consequently, that excessive policing practices emerge in equilibrium. 1 | INTRODUCTION Crime detection and prevention are two important duties performed by police officers every day. To better fulfill these duties, the law often permits police officers to stop a person based upon reasonable suspicion that he may be involved in criminal activity, where reasonable suspicion is a weaker requirement than probable cause (which is required for an arrest, to conduct a search, and for a search warrant). A commonly voiced concern is that police officers often cross the fine line to be observed when trading off fighting crime against the protection of individual rights. For example, a common complaint against New York City's stop-and-frisk program was that stops were used with little focus on stopping those most likely to be engaged in crime (e.g.

When is duplication of effort a good thing in law enforcement?

“…This assumption can be commonly found in the literature on law enforcement-for instance, see Jung et al (2022) and Friehe and Mungan (2021), in which the law enforcers are the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) auditors and police officers, respectively.…”

Law enforcement and political misinformation

“…Adopting a theoretical perspective from the law and economics literature, this paper has a similar motivation to the Beckerian law enforcement model, for example, Becker (1968), Garoupa (1997), and Polinsky and Shavell (2000), and its extension to exploring effects of self-interested law enforcers, for example, Stigler (1970), Friedman (1999), Garoupa andKlerman (2002), andYahagi (2018). In particular, this paper can be seen as an extension of law enforcement models with political competition such as in Langlais and Obidzinski (2017), Mungan (2017), Obidzinski (2019), Friehe andMungan (2021), andYahagi (2021). The most similar contribution is Langlais and Obidzinski (2017), who applies the Downs model with certainty to investigate the impact of political decision-making processes on law enforcement policies.…”

“… 4. Different from other law enforcement models with political competition, Mungan (2017) and Friehe and Mungan (2021) assume that the criminal benefit is stochastic and obtain an equilibrium similar to that of the probabilistic voting model.…”

“… 9. We could extend our model to include a setting where all voters are potential criminals, casting their ballots based on their criminal decisions using the stochastic crime decision model proposed by Mungan (2017) and Friehe and Mungan (2021). However, such an expansion would increase the complexity of our model, while the overall implications would remain unchanged.…”

Should the police give priority to violence within criminal organizations? A personnel economics perspective

“…Moreover their paper is focused on individual criminals, rather than criminal organizations. Friehe and Mungan (2021) build a model to explain the excessive practice of police stops. In contrast to our paper, the actions of the police are not examined in light of the need for the criminal organization to maintain internal discipline.…”