Corrupt Police
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Date
2020-08-21
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University
Abstract
PERC Professor Danila Serra, along with Klaus Abbink and Dmitry Ryvkin employ laboratory experiments to examine the effects of corrupt law enforcement on crime within a society. The authors embed corruption in a social dilemma setting where citizens simultaneously choose whether to obey the law or to break the law and impose a negative externality on others. Police officers observe citizens' behavior and decide whether to impose fines on law-breakers or, in treatments with corruption, extort bribes from any citizen. In the first study, findings show that the presence of police substantially reduces crime, as compared to a baseline setting without police. This is true also when police officers are corrupt. This result is driven by corrupt police officers using bribes in a targeted manner as a substitute for official fines to punish law-breakers. In the second study, the authors test the effectiveness of two reward mechanisms aimed at reducing police corruption, both of which are based on society-wide police performance measures and not on the observation/monitoring of individual officers. Results show that both mechanisms make bribery more targeted toward law-breakers, and one of them leads to a moderate reduction in crime
Description
Macroeconomics
Keywords
corruption, bribery, crime, police, experiment, Macroeconomics