Finders keepers: Forfeiture laws, policing incentives, and local budgets

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Baicker, Katherine; Jacobson, Mireille
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Irvine; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2007.03.009
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 2113-2136
• 关键词: asset forfeiture; police incentives; local government budgets

摘要

To encourage anti-drug policing, the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allow police agencies to keep a substantial fraction of the assets that they seize in drug arrests. We use rich new data on police seizures and local spending to explore the reactions of both governments and police to the incentives created by these policies. We find that local governments offset police seizures by reducing their other allocations to police, partially undermining the incentives laid out in statute and diverting the earmarked funds to other purposes. Police, in turn, respond to the real net incentives for seizures, once local offsets are taken into account, by increasing the drug arrest rate. Heroin prices also increase, suggesting that the increased emphasis on anti-drug policing raises the supply costs of illicit drugs. These findings highlight both the promise and pitfalls of using financial incentives to solve agency problems in a federal system: both local agents and intervening governments have sophisticated responses to financial incentives, and these responses must be taken into account in both designing effective policies and evaluating their consequences. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All tights reserved.