TITLE:
Paper More Cops or More Jobs? A Trade-Off Framework in Economics of Crime
AUTHORS:
Faraz Farhidi
KEYWORDS:
Economics of Crime, Instrumental Variable, Police Force, Theoretical Modeling, Trade-Off Analysis
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Applied Sociology,
Vol.14 No.1,
January
26,
2024
ABSTRACT: This paper studies and theorizes the impact of law enforcement in cities
on criminal activities. Exploring primarily causing elements, the results from
two IV approaches show that increasing police officers per capita in regions
does not reduce the corresponding crimes. There are two sets of data used in this
research for each IV strategy—the US’s city-level and state-level data.
Falsification tests are conducted to validate the empirical conclusion. The
results show that increasing the number of law enforcements does not lead to a
lower crime rate in the US. Based on the results, I propose an alternative
theoretical model compared to the conventional framework, in which there is a
trade-off between budgeting police forces—leading to lower crimes—and higher
unemployment rates—leading to more crimes. This new framework provides more
insights on the roots of such societal tragedy and narrows the gap between the
theoretical and empirical findings. Thus, an alternative to control crimes
could be legalizing and taxing (possible) illicit activities reduces the crimes
and provides funds for creating new jobs while alleviating the pressure on the
police forces document.