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Overkill
My research on bounty hunters shows that they are more effective than the police in recapturing criminals. I'm often asked (and sometimes told), however, about the potential for abuse and mistaken arrests. No one ever bothers, however, to ask how bounty hunters compare on the abuse score with the police. My suspicion is that the bounty hunters would come out better because they know that a mistake can put them out of business while the police may routinely break down the wrong door under cover of law.
Some data on the potential for abuse and mistaken arrest or worse from the police is provided in a new Cato report, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, by Radley Balko. The report notes:
Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.
Along with the paper is an interactive map showing hundreds of mistaken raids over the past several decades, a number of which lead to the deaths of innocents.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on July 18, 2006 at 07:08 AM in Law | Permalink
Comments
There is actually a TV series about a bounty hunter, called, I think, Dog the
Bounty Hunter, and on, I think, A&E. What is also notable is that Dog and his
"assistants" impose almost no physical harm on the bail jumpers they round up and their sources of information about where the jumpers are is 10 times better than the police have.
Posted by: bob tollison at Jul 18, 2006 7:25:05 AM
Americans have a tendency to overlook the obvious connection between the "militarization of civilian law enforcement" in the U.S. and the absence of gun control. No kidding cops in the U.S. are jumpy, they're worried about getting shot. This systematically affects not just their tactics (e.g. "unannounced entry"), but their entire demeanour. (Compare the experience of being pulled over on the highway by the RCMP in Canada, and by a state trooper in the U.S.) There is a straightforward arms race between criminals and the police in every country (recall the big debate in the U.K. when bobbies first started carrying guns). Given that 'criminals' are typically an unknown subset of the general population, the level of force one is willing to permit the police is a direct response to the level of deadly force one is willing to make available to the population.
Posted by: Joseph Heath at Jul 18, 2006 9:43:33 AM
This is an interesting post in light of the post below regarding the cost-
effectiveness of police. Balko's research could suggest that higher
police expenditures could exacerbate the problem, as departments feel the
need to justify their spending. So, there's probably some trade-off
between the enhanced deterrence effect of the additional police and the
enhanced aggression of the departments. I'm not sure of a reasonable way
to compare the costs to society of these two sides.
Posted by: Mike at Jul 18, 2006 9:45:19 AM
Joseph,
What's it like being pulled over by the RCMP? My only other experience being pulled over is in India, where you're supposed to get out of the car and walk over to the cop.
I suspect doing that would get you shot in the US :)
Posted by: Continental Drift at Jul 18, 2006 9:50:45 AM
Seems like it would matter what the department was spending that extra money on. An extra squadron of Officer Friendlies might do some good while a tank and a crate full of tear gas...not so much.
Posted by: clyde at Jul 18, 2006 10:07:02 AM
I have one word for this discussion: TheWarOnDrugs.
Okay, so that was four words. But you get the idea. The war on drugs is not a war on any one person, so that applying the force of law to any individual is going to have little effect. The war on drugs is a war on an occupation. It is intended to make that occupation unprofitable, and yet .... (as any economist would have predicted) (had they bothered consulting us) (as if they ever do) it could not have that affect.
Either drugs are not horrifically addicting (in which case there is no reason for the war on drugs) or else drugs are horrifically addicting and very insensitive to price (in which case the war on drugs could not succeed in eliminating profitable sales of drugs).
Posted by: Russell Nelson at Jul 18, 2006 12:01:29 PM
Either drugs are not horrifically addicting (in which case there is no reason for the war on drugs) or else drugs are horrifically addicting and very insensitive to price (in which case the war on drugs could not succeed in eliminating profitable sales of drugs).
This seems wrong to me. Or do you agree that raising taxes on cigarettes has no effect on the rates of smoking? Everything I've ever read portrays cigarettes as at least as addicting as most illegal drugs.
Posted by: bob montgomery at Jul 18, 2006 12:13:17 PM
Is there strong evidence that raising prices has much effect on convincing people to quit smoking? My intuition would be that relatively few people would be motivated to quit (which every smoker I've ever talked to says is incredibly hard to do), and that for people who were already addicted, higher cigarette taxes would mostly just transfer more of the addict's income to the government. It might be hard to measure this, since there are other, probably much bigger, reasons for people to stop smoking, and they're acting at the same time--laws restricting where you may smoke, overwhelming and widely available evidence that smoking is bad for you (albeit mostly long-term), decreasing social acceptability of smoking as fewer people smoke, etc.
Posted by: albatross at Jul 18, 2006 12:43:24 PM
Elasticity of demand for cigarettes is higher than one might think:
http://www1.worldbank.org/tobacco/book/html/chapter4.htm
The RCMP are pretty relaxed. They've been known to apologize for having to give you a ticket.
Posted by: Joseph Heath at Jul 18, 2006 1:16:41 PM
positive on a higher elasticity of demand then one might think: in germany the tobacco tax dropped by a lot always more, when it was raised in a series of subsequent raises in the last years...
Posted by: benny at Jul 18, 2006 1:55:43 PM
The A-Team was also more efficient than the government at protecting and rescuing:
http://blog.mises.org/archives/005325.asp
Also,the latest in QEJ: Pay, Reference Points, and Police Performance:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/qjec.121.3.783
Posted by: Pablo at Jul 18, 2006 2:24:59 PM
Wow, reading the stories on the interactive map is very scary. It would seem (and I suppose this is to be expected) that police work attracts some people with jack-booted fascist tendencies.
The stories also make clear that very few of these raids have to do with actually protecting anyone. They are almost all drug raids. Russell has a great insight about this: either a drug is not very addictive, in which case there is no reason to crack down on it, or a drug is very addictive, in which case cracking down on it has little effect.
Russell's insight suggests an interesting topic for a paper. Instead of asking pharmacologists how addicitive something is, we could define addiction via price elasticity and ask an economist. Has anyone ever tried to do this? (Of course, this definition leads to some un-conventional addictive substances, like drinking water.)
I do understand that nanny-state moralizers are in the majority in our country, but I am nonetheless surprised that they have such an overwhelming majority that there is no significant political voice against the war on drugs.
Posted by: David Wright at Jul 18, 2006 6:18:50 PM
"Americans have a tendency to overlook the obvious connection between the "militarization of civilian law enforcement" in the U.S. and the absence of gun control."
And apparently some Canadians have a tendency to oversimplify the relationship between gun control and criminal access to guns.
Posted by: Anonymous2 at Jul 18, 2006 9:43:32 PM
While reading the paper, I noticed that all kinds of police forces, from small-town sheriffs to the NYPD,
have been given access to heavy - but mostly outdated - weaponary: such as the M16. A couple of weeks ago
I read an article about the M16: turns out it's considered a notoriously inefficient weapon starting from
it's introduction in the sixies. The military and serveral arms manufacturers are trying to get the assault
rifle replaced. Maybe there's a financial motive to the militarisation of the American police: it's a great
way to sustain a market for the production and development of new arms.
About elasticities of drugs: in my country, the government used a tax increase on tobacco to fill a gap in
state budget. This indicates a demand elasticity for tobacco which is smaller than 1.
Posted by: JSK at Jul 18, 2006 11:11:38 PM
I have two comments:
First, Bruce Benson in "To Serve and Protect" mentions that US states spend very little time, money or efforts at seeking out criminals who have fled the trial process. I think he even goes so far as to point out the really low rates of success at them performing such avtivities compared to random checking of criminal records during routine traffic stops. It's more successful just to wait till the criminals come around the bend again.
2. In the question of brutality used by bounty hunters compared to police officers there might be a bias in the measurement in that bounty hunters might perform violence with greater certainty as to the guilt of their suspect than police do.
Posted by: Daniel J. D'Amico at Jul 18, 2006 11:21:39 PM
"Americans have a tendency to overlook the obvious connection between the 'militarization of civilian law enforcement' in the U.S. and the absence of gun control."
This connection is not at all obvious. Look at the Cato Institute's interactive map. The densest cluster of incidents is found along the Boston-Washington corridor, where gun control is more prominent than in other parts of the country (here in DC guns are basically illegal). In Wyoming and North Dakota, with far fewer restrictions, there is not one incident between them -- and very few in most of the Midwest.
"There is a straightforward arms race between criminals and the police in every country (recall the big debate in the U.K. when bobbies first started carrying guns)."
While it is logical to believe that the police purchase weapons that are more powerful than those possessed by criminals, I doubt the driving force behind gun purchases by criminals are the type of police weaponry. Seems to me that criminals buy their weapons primarily for use against either other criminals (especially gangs) or their intended victims, who may be armed themselves. So I don't think this is a case where the police are trying to obtain superior weapons to criminals and criminals are trying to build a better a better arsenal than the police.
It seems to me that the primary difference between the US and Canada isn't gun control, but the willingness of the population to use guns to commit crimes. The US, basically since its inception, has been a more violent society than Canada. What that is I am not sure. I very much doubt that if Canada were to abolish all forms of gun control that the RCMP would suddenly revert to a similar form as the US police, simply because I do not think Canadians would suddenly rush out to buy guns and then start a crime spree with them.
Posted by: Colin at Jul 19, 2006 8:52:20 AM
Colin -- I associated the density of incidence in the Boshwash corridor
with the population density rather then gun control. If you look at
the map that was the first thing that I saw -- a strong correlation between
population density and the density of incidence except that there seemed
to be more incidences in the Southeast & Texas then population density
would suggest.
Posted by: spencer at Jul 19, 2006 9:35:17 AM
Russell Nelson wrote:
Either drugs are not horrifically addicting (in which case there is no reason for the war on drugs) or else drugs are horrifically addicting and very insensitive to price (in which case the war on drugs could not succeed in eliminating profitable sales of drugs).
The first part of that sounds wrong to me: one can come up with other plausible reasons for regulating drugs other than their addictiveness (even if one thinks that, on balance, the War on Drugs is a mistake). In particular, many drugs have large social costs, both to drug users and to others. We regulate lots of non-addictive substances because of those kinds of impacts.
Jim
Posted by: scarhill at Jul 19, 2006 11:33:39 AM
Spencer -- you are correct. No doubt higher population plays a significant factor -- likely a huge one. I just take issue with the logic that the police raids are a product of gun control or lack thereof. In DC we have plenty of guns despite gun control measures. Granted, obtaining guns is relatively simple since states with laxer gun laws are nearby (this makes the huge assumption, of course, that criminals go the legal route to obtain weapons). By the same token, however, I doubt it is especially difficult for Canadians to obtain guns in the US and sneak them over the border if they want.
Posted by: Colin at Jul 19, 2006 12:03:49 PM
Ah my army-gets-rid-of-old-equipment-to-buy-new theory doesn't make any sence? :P Too bad.
Posted by: JSK at Jul 19, 2006 5:49:46 PM
Regarding the comment that the M-16 is not an efficient weapon, that's incorrect. It's not as modern as a HK G36, but even the most modern assault rifles are not sufficiently superior to the M-16A3 (and its shortened brother, the M-4) to justify changing it. It is, however, an ineffective police weapon. Police departments justify purchasing them in order to counter criminals with body armor, but the 5.56mm bullet it fires will not only penetrate all but the strongest military body armor, but exit the back, hit the person standing behind the target, exit that person, and hit someone else. That is why it was rather amusing following September 11 when airports around the country were stocked with National Guard soldiers armed with M-16s. What were they going to do with them? Fire one in an airport, and you kill not just the target but half a dozen innocent bystanders.
I think the police buy them because it means they have a modern SWAT team, and you're just a hick village cop if you don't have a modern SWAT team.
Posted by: MDF at Jul 20, 2006 12:22:37 AM
But the Pentagon offers their weaponry at the police departments at discount prices. State organisations are not that much different from commercial organisations in the sense that they dislike losing resources (liquid or otherwise). Therefore the question is: what does the Pentagon have to gain by practically giving away rifles, tanks and even helicopters? Or is it altruism? :P
About the M16:
[quote]When the M14 reached Vietnam with U.S. troops in 1965, certain flaws became apparent. It was long and somewhat cumbersome for effective use in close quarters battle or jungle environments. Ammunition was lighter than the .30-06, which meant more quantities were carried on patrol, though it was heavier than the .30 Carbine. Fully-automatic fire was often criticized as useless, due to significant recoil, and the rifles were eventually delivered locked in semi-automatic mode. [...}
Meanwhile the troops desperately tried to increase their own firepower in the face of the Vietcong's Soviet-designed AK-47s.[/quote]
-and-
[quote]Replacement of the M16 family has been proposed at various points, and its longevity is in part due to a series of delays and failures in projects meant to replace it. [/quote]
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle#Future_replacement.3F
So there is surely some incentive for the armed forces the replace it. But how the get rid of the ones that are still around..
Posted by: JSK at Jul 20, 2006 2:44:47 AM
the 5.56mm bullet it fires will not only penetrate all but the strongest military body armor, but exit the back, hit the person standing behind the target, exit that person, and hit someone else
Fire one in an airport, and you kill not just the target but half a dozen innocent bystanders.
Not.
The 5.56 round usually doesn't penetrate past one person, splintering on impact:
http://www.snipercentral.com/223.htm
Or google "5.56 ballistics". The 5.56mm is not a potent rifle round.
Posted by: anonymous at Jul 20, 2006 2:53:03 AM
Colin: That's a good point about the arms race -- it is indirect, not straightforward. There is an arms race between criminals, with the police typically playing catch-up. Gun control dampens the former, making it somewhat easier for the police to avoid falling too far behind.
As for the last point, about the U.S. simply being a "more violent society" than Canada -- that's basically the Michael-Moore-Bowling-for-Columbine line. I don't think that sort of hand-waving about "culture" is very useful, especially when presented as grounds for ignoring the incentives that people face. When I lived in Evanston, IL (back in the bad old 1990's) the high school kids who hung out on my street corner used to keep guns in their backpacks. (I found that out one day on the local news, because someone took a shot at them, only to be wounded when "the crowd returned fire." One 12-year old girl was killed.) Living in Toronto, I don't worry about that sort of thing. Is it because of some magical Canadian "culture" that immunizes the teenagers on my block from the desire to shoot people? Or is the fact that, in effect, they have no access to handguns?
Posted by: Joseph Heath at Jul 20, 2006 10:33:31 AM
"Americans have a tendency to overlook the obvious connection between the "militarization of civilian law enforcement" in the U.S. and the absence of gun control."
What nonsense. Police are worried about being shot by CRIMINALS, who by definition ignore the law. Gun control, also by definition, chiefly affects those who follow the law, i.e. non-criminals.
This is lesson #1 in understanding gun control. I cannot comprehend why it is not more widely understood.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Jul 20, 2006 11:29:13 AM
