It was a still all-to-familiar tragedy, still clouded by uncertain facts: Someone hijacked a car in North Minneapolis and fled. Police were called and gave chase. The suspect sped through a neighborhood with a patrol car in pursuit.
The criminal cleared a traffic-light-controlled intersection on Lyndale. The officer didn’t and hit a crossing car that reportedly had a green. An innocent driver was killed. The officer was injured, as was the driver of a third car somehow involved.
The tragedy is in the death of an entirely innocent person, someone’s spouse, child, parent, friend, neighbor or colleague. It is all too familiar because such sad ends to police chases have happened for decades.
However, one must include the qualifier “still,” because police procedures are changing. Frequency of deaths from such incidences is falling, as are high-speed police pursuits themselves. Yet some still occur and probably will into the future.
But is there any economics in this? Or is this a matter for criminology?
Economists may contribute little to reducing such deaths. However, the tragedy is a teaching moment for us in illustrating the inevitable necessary choices between competing options, even if non-monetary.
Arresting perpetrators is a necessary step to protecting the public from crime. It is a “public good,” in the economics sense of something that would not occur without government.
In this regard, economists view third parties being injured or killed by speeding police as an “external cost” of pursuits. Being able to drive down a street without being rammed by a police cruiser certainly is important for society. We can avoid such deaths by completely banning pursuits of fleeing suspects. But that creates incentives for criminals to just jump in a vehicle and drive away, at least delaying their arrest and perhaps destroying evidence.
The same question arises with other police actions that can harm bystanders. Being hit with stray bullets in a shoot-out or being crashed into on the Interstate by some perp’s speeding vehicle forced into a spin by a police PIT maneuver pose the same tradeoffs.
Nor is law enforcement the only government function that raises tradeoffs between objectives. Library fines may be minor in scope and impact when compared with pursuit-related fatalities, but they are much more common in society and pose similar choices for the parties involved. Public libraries are also an economic public good, just like public safety, generally provided by government or philanthropy. They increase the well-being of citizens and contribute to making people more economically and socially productive. Access to books long has been a ladder than helps some kids climb out of poverty. Fines, especially those that go unpaid, potentially limit this access.
For a library system to work, borrowed books must be returned. If there is no penalty for non-return, most people will still bring them back. Others would risk having their borrowing privileges revoked, or simply forget, and not return the book or pay the fine. But, as with taxes, some incentive for compliance is important, or at least long was thought to be.
This often falls harder for poorer kids, especially those in unsettled home situations or ones without cars, to return books. And it is harder for them to pay fines. Yet it is poor kids who yearn to read who are the greatest beneficiaries of unfettered library access. These benefits eventually will accrue to society as a whole and not just the specific child.
In recent years, critics have argued that late fees should simply be abolished. The revenue they bring into library systems is piffling. Defenders of the status quo correctly point out that income is not the objective, motivating the return of books is. Acquisition budgets are shrinking, and media get more expensive.
So what do we do?
In both cases, police pursuits and library fines, there has been a trend to try to reduce the external costs. More limits are being placed on when and how police give chase or use firearms when bystanders are present. Many public libraries have eliminated fines or at least increased the allowable sum of outstanding fines before pausing borrowing rights.
In both cases, someone will study the outcomes to see what the tradeoffs prove out in actuality versus what had been anticipated before any changes. Have new police use-of-force rules reduced injuries and deaths? Did limiting late fees really increase the loss of books?
Especially in the case of harm to bystanders from law enforcement actions, increased public concern has increased the tabulation and publication of data. There long were no uniform national statistics on shot bystanders or T-boned innocent drivers. Now that data is tabulated at state and federal levels and is available to the public on the internet.
Policing is inherently knottier than administrative problems like return of books, compliance with conservation requirements in farm subsidy programs or lying on applications for college financial aid.
German strategist Carl von Clausewitz spoke of “the fog of war” permeating military action. Information is uncertain, fear and anger cloud thinking. The same is true for policing. You can set criteria for when to pursue, but instant decisions must be made on sketchy information. Rules can specify which streets pursuing officers can do what on, but when speeds are high, bullets may soon fly and adrenaline is pumping, instantaneous decisions on whether one can safely make it through on a yellow or not are skewed. But again, incentives matter. If there are no penalties for officers who ignore protocols, these become a dead letter.
Technology can help.
I hope physical books never go away, but the trend is toward electronic media that cannot be lost or stolen in the same way, and can “expire” on e-readers when the lending period ends. Here the issue is of access to technology and the internet, also knotty, dominates.
Technology already exists that could enable owners of hijacked cars to enter codes into smartphones that would kill the engines. Police will eventually gain that power more broadly. That may eliminate vehicle pursuits, at least for newer cars, and limit crime generally. But, as with increasingly ubiquitous CCTV and with pervasive facial recognition software, the specter of Big Brother gets more and more realistic.
The one durable insight from economics is that, regardless of technology, there will always be tradeoffs in government tasks as well as in private transactions, and occasional tragic consequences will never be eliminated completely.
St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.
Real World Economics: On police chases and library fines - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
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