Competence in policing

David Montgomery, Sari Horwitz and Marc Fisher have a great story in the Washington Post about how the police tracked down the murderers in Boston. Also see Spencer Ackerman in Wired magazine. On a similar theme, look back at the attack at Times Square in New York.

We in India fare dismally on this. Lacking competence in the police, we repeatedly engage in faulty tradeoffs in security, where police either infringe on the freedom of citizens or resort to brutality against innocent `suspects'. Every time the police quickly solve a case, I worry that they merely tortured some plausible sounding suspect.

Law and order is the most important and most basic public good. Dense urban congregations, which are the essence of modern creative capitalism, are only possible with very high levels of safety. The US is priority #1 for the bad guys, and has had two attacks in 12 years, both of which were followed by outstanding investigations. We in India suffer from thousands of attacks, most of which are never solved. This shows the low capabilities of our law enforcement crew.

We in India go wrong at three levels:

• Elections have degenerated into competitive subsidy programs; both politicians and voters have stopped focusing on performance of the government on public goods. Left-oriented intellectuals are complicit in this, with an emphasis on inequality and subsidies rather than on public goods. When voters are not focused on public goods, the accountability through elections does not generate feedback loops in favour of better public goods.
• In this environment, inadequate resources go into public goods, the most important of which is the criminal justice system.
• Within the criminal justice system, there is little accountability, and we are not seeing feedback loops through which the system is constantly reshaped (within existing budget constraints) towards better performance.

The recent wave of outrage on law and order should ideally help set a new course. See Law and order: Going from outrage to action. Mistreating women is not encoded in our culture or our DNA: it is endogenous to the incentives provided by the criminal justice system. The same Indians behave very differently towards women when placed in alternative criminal justice systems in other countries. If enough voters demand performance from politicians for better law and order, we will get a greater focus on it, in terms of:

• More top management time. E.g. how many hours per year does the PM work on law and order in Delhi versus how many hours does he spend on NREGA?
• More money. E.g. how much money do we put into law and order in Delhi versus how much money do we put into NREGA? 
• More and better people. E.g. how do we get the best and brightest civil servants out of relatively unproductive tasks (subsidies) and into the things that matter (public goods)? How do we increase the staff strength of government in public goods, while cutting the size of government on subsidies? How do we make careers in police, courts and jails more attractive, and careers in education, health and welfare programs less interesting?
• More analysis. How do we get more research papers on the criminal justice system, and fewer research papers on development economics?