False proxies for enforcement distortions in "policing for profit"research
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abstract
Concerns about law enforcer incentives being affected by a desire to raise revenue for their departments or other governmental units has led to considerable research. Part of this scholarship attempts to identify a causal relationship between monetary incentives and distortions in enforcer behavior. Because enforcer behavior is often unobservable, they rely on proxies like arrests or citations to infer distortions in behavior. I construct a simple model which reveals that in general there is no meaningful relationship between these measures and enforcer incentives or behavior, and therefore these measures may be false proxies.