When should the police use confrontational tactics?

Northwestern Now: Summaries

EVANSTON - Citizens depend on police to provide public safety while maintaining the trust of the community. How can democratic societies balance these two, often conflicting, aims -- given citizens’ often divergent views over basic tenets of criminal justice policy?In a newly published article, Northwestern University economist Charles F. Manski and his co-author, Carnegie Mellon University criminologist Daniel S. Nagin, outline a “formal model of optimal policing” that can be used to resolve tensions between public safety and community trust -- and that also can help a public that is prone to privileging one over the other, depending on the circumstances, to keep both in mind.“In our view, dispassionate evaluation of policing tactics is the best way to both honor and achieve the sometimes conflicting objectives of crime-control policy in a democratic society,” the authors wrote.Charles F. ManskiNagin and Manski, the Board of Trustees Professor in Economics and a fellow with Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research, aimed to create a cost-benefit model that expresses the social benefits and costs of proactive crime-prevention strategies. They built their model with a fundamental tradeoff of policing tactics in mind: How much does a tactic reduce crime and how much does it interfere with innocent people’s lives? And how much does it have a disproportionate impact across racial and ethnic groups?While police use many tactics to prevent crime, from actively arresting suspects to passively stationing a driverless patrol car in a high-crime area, the authors investigate those that involve direct interaction with the public. Taking the example of the widely used confrontational tactic of “stop, question, and frisk” (SQF), an investigative procedure where an officer stops and questions an individual and then searches him or her, the researchers assume that such confrontational police tactics deter crime but also invade individual privacy the more they are used.In the ...

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