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Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#31

Post by clairity »

kgwxd wrote: post #6

It makes no sense that money police collects goes directly towards funding any government department. It should go into a tax refund pool.

that's a good policy change that mitigates the moral hazard of fines in general. i know it'd never happen, but i'd love to see something similar with fines from all sorts of companies, to reduce their use all over the economy as a way of hiding the true cost of products (particularly internet and phones).

however, i'd challenge the idea that solving more crimes is necessarily a better use of our tax dollars.

cars are the number one killer of people in america that police can directly affect. so why wouldn't we want more enforcement of traffic rules (which is where most of those fines come from), to reduce traffic fatalities? (we need to know which rules best reduce fatalities of course, but that's a given)

suicides are also high on that list. community policing techniques can help there.

and don't get me wrong, homicide investigations are important, for both prevention and justice, but homicides shouldn't dictate spending on, and the attention of, our police force.

at the bottom of the list are mass shootings (basically a rounding error of yearly gun deaths), yet police forces spend disproportionate amounts of money on (reacting to) mass shootings (assault weapons, active shooter gear, tanks, etc.).

Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#32

Post by clairity »

jmulho wrote: post #23
mc32 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. All this should go into a central/state coffers and redustributed to policing based on need. There are rural areas greatly underserved by law enforcement due to low pop densities, so there has to be something which accounts fir that.

There are governments in rural areas funded by speed traps.

i really dislike speed traps. i'd even support a proposition to convert all speed limits to suggested speeds (thereby abolishing fines for speeding). you could and should still punish dangerous driving, but speed by itself wouldn't serve as the threshold for unsafe driving.

Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#33

Post by rightbyte »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #3

>If Middletown’s police department collected only about 1 percent of its revenue from fees and fines, our model predicts it would solve 53 percent of its violent crimes and 32 percent of its property crimes. But if Middletown’s police department instead collected 3 percent of its revenue from fees and fines, our model predicts that clearance rates would fall to 41 percent for violent crimes and 16 percent for propert…

How about this:

Places where the police collect more fines has higher criminality and the police has less resources per crime to solve crimes?

I don't believe this nonsense article at all. They are overfitting their data. It's more or less fraud. They are mixing units in the regression. Most of the control variables are correlated etc.

They even tried to link fracking to this somehow, but didn't find significance.

http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents/...

"Our results suggest that institutional changes—such as decreasing municipal government reliance on fines and fees for revenue—are important for changing police behavior and improving the provision of public safety."

What they are acctually discovering is that crime clearance rate is mostly dependent on crime rate.

Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#35

Post by cascom »

prepend wrote: post #16

I wasn’t able to find any controls for the possibility of high percent fee-funded police department having lower ability to invest in quality workforce and training. I see the correlation, but not the causal link. Is high fee a symptom of lower effectiveness rather than high fees causing lower effectiveness? Or they have no causal link at all? This seems pretty important, anybody else get this from the paper? I’m int…

yeah - i don't even know how you begin to compare a rural police department with a handful of officers (who hand off major cases to county/state investigators and are really there to break up bar fights/domestic disputes, keep the roads safe, and provide police reports for property crimes) to say the NYC police department that has 30k+

Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#36

Post by hfdgiutdryg »

clairity wrote: post #31
kgwxd wrote: post #6

It makes no sense that money police collects goes directly towards funding any government department. It should go into a tax refund pool.

that's a good policy change that mitigates the moral hazard of fines in general. i know it'd never happen, but i'd love to see something similar with fines from all sorts of companies, to reduce their use all over the economy as a way of hiding the true cost of products (particularly internet and phones). however, i'd challenge the idea that solving more crimes is necessarily a better use of our tax dollars. cars are…

cars are the number one killer of people in america that police can directly affect. so why wouldn't we want more enforcement of traffic rules

I think automotive industry innovation can do more to bring the fatalities down than any practical amount of policing. Also, I'm tired of the low standards for actual driving ability in America, combined with the lazy speed enforcement approach by cops. My life has very, very rarely been threatened by a speeder, but it has regularly been threatened (particularly when I'm cycling or walking) by negligent or outright incompetent drivers.

Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#37

Post by CM30 »

antsar wrote: post #18
merpnderp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to think of a place to stick the money that wouldn't incentivize over-policing and couldn't think of one. But your option is perfect. There's obviously no incentive for government employees to return money to tax payers, so if anything, this would incentivize under-enforcement of fines and fees.

Aren't government employees also taxpayers? The incentive is much weaker, but still there.

Well at least then everyone would benefit rather than just the police/government.

Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#38

Post by stevew20 »

prepend wrote: post #16

I wasn’t able to find any controls for the possibility of high percent fee-funded police department having lower ability to invest in quality workforce and training. I see the correlation, but not the causal link. Is high fee a symptom of lower effectiveness rather than high fees causing lower effectiveness? Or they have no causal link at all? This seems pretty important, anybody else get this from the paper? I’m int…

Instead of pushing for a data driven conclusion, what about this:

A police officer has 1.0 amount of time in a shift. If he spends 0.2 of his shift sitting at a speed trap trying to meet some quota, he has 0.8 of his shift left to patrol / help solve crimes; however, the reciprocal of this ratio could occur to, depending on which duties he is assigned.

Now step back... The entire police force has 1.0 amount of time per officer per shift. In order to meet budget goals, they allocate 0.8 of that time to speed traps. Now 0.2 of man hours are spent actually doing anything useful (hint: solving crimes do not pay the bills... ).

We can examine data to confirm this, however I don't see the need. When you have a time budget, every activity takes a portion of that time. If you spend 90% of your time playing solitaire at work, you aren't going to be very productive. The relationship is absolute, so the data should support it. If not, there is some noise interfering.

Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#39

Post by mc32 »

clairity wrote: post #32
jmulho wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are governments in rural areas funded by speed traps.

i really dislike speed traps. i'd even support a proposition to convert all speed limits to suggested speeds (thereby abolishing fines for speeding). you could and should still punish dangerous driving, but speed by itself wouldn't serve as the threshold for unsafe driving.

Problem with that is that for the most part speed is a pretty objective measure —whereas “dangerous driving” isn’t, so will result in uneven interpretation/application.

Re: Police that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crime

#40

Post by ransom1538 »

Our local police department (Oviedo florida) takes a police car 200 ft from the station and sits it by a 25mph zone that feeds into a 50 mph zone [1]. Now that my wife and I have both been ticketed (30mph) we go the speed limit -- what is even more weird --- going 25mph near a freeway is really dangerous as cars honk and freak out behind you swerving to get around you.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B038'57.5%22N+81%C2%...

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