Police Discretion and Public Safety / Felipe M. Gonçalves, Steven Mello.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gonçalves, Felipe M.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Mello, Steven.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w31678.

NBER working paper series no. w31678

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.

Summary:

We study the implications of police discretion for public safety. Highway patrol officers exercise discretion over fines by deviating from statutory fine rules. Relying on variation across officers in this discretionary behavior, we find that harsher sanctions reduce future traffic offending and crash involvement. We then show that officer discretion over sanctions decreases public safety by comparing observed reoffending rates with those in a counterfactual without discretion, estimated using an identification at infinity approach. About half the safety cost of discretion is due to officer decisions which result in harsh sanctions for motorists who are least deterred by them. We provide evidence that this officer behavior is attributable to a preference for allocating harsh fines to motorists with higher recidivism risk, who are also the least responsive to harsher sanctions.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2023.