Executive Order (EO) 13771 on “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs” introduces a new regulatory budgeting system in the U.S. federal rulemaking process. International experience suggests that the new rule, aimed both at reducing the number of regulations and the volume of regulatory costs, will focus on a subset of regulatory impacts, most certainly the direct costs imposed by regulation on businesses, or even a subset thereof. The paper discusses possible ways to make sense of the new rule, without undermining the soundness of benefit-cost analysis mandated by EO12866. The paper concludes that the new system, while potentially promoting more retrospective regulatory reviews, will risk fundamentally affecting the quality of regulation in the United States, generating frictions and inefficiencies throughout the administration, to the detriment of social welfare.

Although more than 100 billion dollars is spent each year on policing, we know very little about what works, and still less about whether the benefits of various policing policies and practices outweigh the costs. In particular, although there has been some important work done to assess the effects of various practices, and even to monetize some of the benefits of reducing crime, there has been virtually no attention paid to the other side of the benefit-cost equation: the social costs that particular policing practices potentially can impose. In February 2017, the Policing Project at NYU School of Law held a conference aimed at jumpstarting the use of benefit-cost analysis to assess policing practices, and to begin to tackle the many methodological challenges to doing so. Here, we provide an overview of the existing literature, identify the serious gaps that remain, and sketch out a research agenda for moving forward.

This article first catalogs the curious lack of benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in policing, given the increasing use of BCA in other areas of criminal justice. Policing has historically been viewed through a benefit-only lens, focusing almost exclusively on the welfare gains associated with the incapacitation of dangerous offenders and the deterrence of future criminal activity. The benefit-only perspective fails to take into account the significant costs of enforcement. Most saliently, the benefit-only perspective limits the discussion of the costs to policing. We argue that BCA of policing should not be limited to the financial perspective of any municipality, but must include the full nonbudgetary social costs and benefits felt by all those who feel the impact of policing. Social costs should include all direct and indirect costs borne by members of society who are impacted by policing practices in addition to costs that appear in police department budgets.

The police are widely recognized as an important deterrent of crime, with investments in policing broadly associated with lower crime rates. Much less is known about how investments in policing contribute to crime reductions, or the relative merits and risks of specific activities in which officers engage, leaving policing as an area in which benefit-cost analysis methods stand to make a significant substantive contribution. However, the implementation of these methods involves challenges related to measuring both the quantity and quality of policing involved in a given dosage of policing, as well as the causal effects of police practices on crime. This essay lays out several of the challenges inherent in understanding the benefits and costs of policing practices, with a specific eye toward practices commonly known as “proactive policing” practices, and their effects on crime rates. I lay out potential strategies for resolving these challenges, which focus largely on identifying exogenous discontinuities in policing practices that can be used to assess outcome differences. Thorough assessment of policing practices should apply as many of these strategies as possible, in order to understand how robust or sensitive substantive conclusions may be to strategies used.

In recent decades, advocates for police reform on the political left and right have proposed numerous changes to how street-level policing operates. One such proposed reform, which has been adopted in jurisdictions nationwide, is “proactive policing,” that is, policing strategies based on the notion that by proactively regulating minor offenses, the police can reduce both serious crime and fear of crime in the community. Yet, as with many proposed police reforms, researchers have not undertaken a through benefit-cost analysis of proactive policing. This article lays out strategies for estimating the impacts of proactive policing, including direct, indirect, and distributional impacts. First, I describe quasi-experimental approaches, which entail partnerships between researchers and police departments and would be particularly useful when a municipality is considering a move to proactive policing in the first instance, expansion of small-scale proactive policing to a larger area, or the introduction of particular new tactics. Second, I describe nonexperimental retrospective approaches, including conventional regression analysis, which can also allow researchers to estimate the effects of proactive policing. I discuss potential threats to validity for both strategies. I close by describing the data that researchers wishing to engage in benefit-cost analysis of proactive policing would need in order to do so.

Law enforcement agencies are adopting a variety of new surveillance technologies at a fast pace. These technologies could have substantial benefits in terms of public safety, but, for many of them, their ability to reduce crime is unknown. Although a small experimental literature addresses some of these technologies, many of the implementations have been too small to provide an accurate measurement of their potential. In this paper, I explore the advantages and make general suggestions about the use of quasi-experimental methodologies in estimating the public safety benefits of police technology. I also consider the specific case of license plate readers and provide some examples of difference-in-differences approaches that could be used to study their efficacy.

This paper identifies the individual components of social harm associated with a hypothetical racially targeted police encounter. Individuals who believe they are being targeted by police because they are members of a racial minority may suffer from fear of physical harm and humiliation by the encounter itself. However, the very fact that individuals will be racially targeted for a police encounter also causes harm to other members of the minority group even if they are not directly subject to an unwarranted encounter. In addition to fear and anxiety over the risk of such an encounter, they will often undertake costly avoidance behaviors to reduce their risk, or to mitigate the risk of any harm if such an encounter occurs. In addition, other members of society who value a nondiscriminatory policing policy might be willing to pay to reduce such unwarranted police encounters, and hence suffer a loss from this policing policy. In addition to discussing possible methodologies for estimating these cost components, this paper raises several issues that must be resolved – such as how to deal with the difference between perceived and actual racially targeted police encounters.

This paper looks at how to measure the tradeoffs in monetary terms that the public is prepared to make with respect to adoption of different community policing options. The approach advanced is a discrete choice experiment in which survey respondents face different policing options which can be described by a set of attributes ranging from costs to outcomes. The main contribution of this paper is to show how to go beyond the usual characterization of the monetized benefits of reducing the level of a specific type of crime to asking the question of whether those benefits differ depending on how that outcome is achieved.