Distraught. Exasperated. Indignant. One cannot possibly comprehend the convoluted layers of sorrow and anger internalized by the victims of tyrannical abuse of power by the supposed “officers of law”. Betrayed. The utopian hopes of social protection and prosperity have long perished inside martyrs’ hearts.
One by one, their brothers and sisters succumb in the hands of the carceral state. “I can’t breathe” exclaimed the 46 year old black man by the name of George Floyd as the vile enforcer of law kneels on his moribund body, slowly losing life. His death is only one of the many cataclysms attributed to the abuse of power by several law enforcers. The accumulative burdens from such acts of oppression triggered a social tipping point.
The Black community along with the global support that they have garnered through emotional and rational connections have decided to proclaim their everlasting struggles through protesting. The economic repercussions felt by a myriad of industries are significant. In order to prepare for the potential damage through vandalism or looting, states and companies have splurged on additional protection.
It is also exacerbated due to the predicted delay in lifting nationwide Covid-19 restrictions. California has spent $2 million and an additional $900,000 on that, while the Australian economy is expected to endure a 1 billion AUD cost. The sheer magnitude of this deep-rooted quagmire is obvious. However, one must ponder, what may possibly be the catalyst of such a cataclysm? And, what can be done to resolve such complex predicament?
Catalyst to the cataclysm
To decipher the definite catalyst of such a convoluted issue is surely an Augean task. A deep delve into police history uncovers the fact that policing in the United States emerged in 1704 from slave patrol. They were tasked to maintain the slavery system by enforcing compliance amongst privately owned slaves and recapturing escapees. A number of journalists and activists perceive the police's inherent dark history as one significant contributor towards its abundance of misconduct observed in today’s society. Peeking through the lens of economics can also enlighten us with a possible cause of police abuse of power.
One prominent economic theory which can be applied to this predicament is the principal-agent theory. The principal-agent relationship refers to a reciprocal relationship in which a principal (one who owns assets) employs agents to manage said assets for them. Being contracted professionally, it is to be expected that the agents internalize and strive to accomplish the same goal as the principal.
However in practice, agents are incentivized to pursue their self-interest (Bosse & Phillips, 2016) in order to reap private gains. Misconducts fuelled by narrow self-interest would then cause a divergence between the two participants’ goals. The two parties are not endowed with the same amount of information as the principals cannot be certain and do not have the capability to control the agents’ actions (information asymmetry).
Applied to the situation at hand, police officers can be perceived as agents of both the general public (directly employed by the government) and the police chiefs (which are in charge of managing their daily tasks) (Mitnick, 1975). Ideologically, the police are physical materializations of communal security as their sole task is to provide society with protection.
Society portrays its compliance with this constitutional ideology by allocating a portion of their income to pay taxes that fund the police. Additionally, police chiefs are tasked to manage and contract police officers to conduct policing activities.
Both of these principals strive for one ultimate goal – providing/receiving social protection. However, several police officers choose to deviate from this singular goal and decide to execute on their self-interest.
This relationship may attribute to “overpolicing” practices in which a great number of incarcerations are levied on minor criminal offenders while also utilizing excessive coercive forces. “Problem officers” who practice those misconducts may be driven by their “authoritarian” personalities (Balch, 1972) and no longer focus on attaining the goal at hand (providing protection).
Problem officers may indeed comply with the goal assigned by the principals but may instead choose to deviate in the methods used to accomplish said goal. “The end justifies the means” greatly describes this particular case of misconduct. Goal-oriented organizations create individual and organizational pressure to succeed on said goal thus increasing individuals’ willingness to achieve the desired objectives even through criminal means (Dodge, 2009). Problem officers may be deluded by their compulsion to attain the ambitious goal of social protection and even resort to the aforementioned practices of overpolicing and usage of overly coercive forces just to achieve said goal.
The personal and societal repercussions of police misconduct are clear and severe. However, similar to defining its unequivocal cause, to distinguish an ideal resolve to such a complex predicament is strenuous.
Curtailing funding, an effective Solution?
Numerous attempts have been made to resolve the police brutality predicament but mostly to no avail. One ambitious approach first implemented in the US by the Obama administration in 2015 was to equip body cameras on all officers of the law. Alas, despite having allocated generous amounts of resources, reports have failed to identify solid, empirical proof of statistically significant improvement in reduced police misconduct resulting from the equipment of body cameras on law enforcement.
A solution that has been scrutinized for a considerable amount of time is defunding the police. As mentioned before, one fundamental catalyst of abuse of power practices effectuated by law enforcement is the abundance of resources levied on to them.
A significant slice of national budgets across the globe are dedicated to provide the supposed “peace officers” sufficient funds to perform their duties. The Land of Liberty itself apportioned 4% of the total combined state and local expenditures towards police funding in 2017. In China the internal security budget totals $210 billion (20% larger than its military defense spending).
Defunding involves reallocating a portion of the funds originally designated for law enforcement into the provision of other public goods deemed necessary for communities, such as mental health professionals and specialized human capital to deal with homelessness. Defunding also aims to abate police’s window of opportunity to practice abuse of power by diminishing the resources available to be utilized by them.
The prevalence of such an unorthodox idea can be observed by the plentiful amount of state representatives already agreeing to divest from the police. Seventeen cities have exhibited their compliance to defund the police and shift their investment into another sector. As a manifestation of his approval of police divestment, Bill de Blasio as the Mayor of the Big Apple has decided to shift a sizable amount from the police department’s annual budget and instead utilize it to fund social services.
Barring the handful iconoclasts, a portion of the population has discovered two potential repercussions of defunding the police force. Firstly, the officers’ responses towards the imposed budget cuts would instead reduce funding on programs not directly involved in daily acts of policing (Southers, 2020). These may include youth development programs and community services, which are law enforcement’s most quintessential contributions towards bettering future generations.
Additionally, reallocation of police budgets would translate to a decrease in policing activities. Consequently, it is theorised that police disinvestment could lead to an escalation in the number of crimes committed. Active acts of policing (frequent patrols, etc) increases the perceived strength of police (Corman & Mocan, 2000) through increasing the perceived certainty and severity of punishments.
This chain of interlinking perceptions would ultimately diminish the number of offenses committed as most potential offenders would be deterred from committing such foul acts of crime. This “deterrence hypothesis” is based on the assumption that individual-level perceptions of crime is greatly determined by macro-level deviations in policing activities such as an increase in patrols and arrests.
Potential offenders would refrain from committing criminal offenses as they perceive themselves as more susceptible to arrests and legal actions due to the perceived increase in police strength (Marvell & Moody, 1996).
Disinvestment would instead decrease the resources available to execute escalating or at the very least constant amounts of policing activities and would in turn result in an increase in criminal offenses due to the decreased deterrence effects felt by potential offenders.
Notwithstanding the theoretical doubts, empirical studies have shown that an increase in police funding does not acquaint to decreased crime rates. A glance at the general trend of police per capita expenditure and the crime rate does not display the hypothesized consistent, negative correlation.
Per capita police expenditures have escalated from 1980 to 2010 while crime rates exhibit an inverted U-shape growth curve, declining from the early 1990s onwards. The incoherence in the growth patterns can be observed in recent years. During a five year period between 2006 until 2010, state and local police per capita expenditures increased from $386 to $412. On the contrary, the crime rate per 100,000 plummeted during the same five year period from 3800 to 3350 crimes reported.
However, as can be observed from the graph above, the year 2012 saw an end to the negative relationship between the two variables as police expenditure per capita plummeted to $389 while the drop in crime rates per 100,000 stayed persistent as the statistic dropped to 3256 crimes. Statistical analysis as elaborated above demonstrates the non-existent correlation between the two variables.
Proponents of police divestment recognize a plethora of potentially more advantageous ways to utilize the funds otherwise “wasted” on excessive police funding.
Due to their sizable budgets, police officers are socially obliged to accomplish duties of which are not inherently their own. For instance, police spend an estimate of 21% of their time to respond to issues regarding mental illness, an issue which police officers are not equipped to resolve.
This issue can partly be attributed to the lack of mental health professionals available to be dispatched to deal with such issues. Therefore, allocating an increasingly large amount towards social necessities such as mental health professionals would be better suited to quench those needs.
Systemic reform towards this seemingly dystopian carceral state has been long overdue. Misuse of power as displayed by a significant portion of law enforcers whether it be caused by an everlasting dominant bargaining position due to the prevalence of the police union and the severity of the principal-agent problem.
An unconventional measure of curtailing police expenditures, of which has been assessed rigorously and implemented partially by 17 states, has gathered significant traction especially after being chanted by indignant protestors within every stride.
Despite its effectiveness yet to be ascertained, numerous empirical studies have concluded that reallocating police budget towards more dire societal needs may prove to be more beneficial than allowing an excessively large allocation of local and state budget to be dedicated to law enforcement.
However, to truly decide whether defunding could garner unequivocal benefits, more in depth analyses have to be carried out. Amidst the shroud of uncertainty regarding which policy is most ideal to be implemented, one thing can be ascertained – police misconduct and abuse of power should not have any significance and any and all efforts should be exerted to abolish such a severe societal inconvenience.
By M. Faishal Harits | Ilmu Ekonomi 2018 | Wakil Kepala Divisi Kajian Kanopi FEB UI 2020
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