{"id":494,"date":"2004-08-25T19:40:06","date_gmt":"2004-08-25T19:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:45","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:45","slug":"law_enforcement_and_legitimacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=494","title":{"rendered":"Law Enforcement and Legitimacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post<\/a> suggesting that one of the key metrics we’re using in law enforcement – the number of people convicted – is the wrong one.<\/p>\n

But what police and prosecutors do from day to day is make arrests and secure verdicts (or guilty pleas) and thus sentences. It seems natural to count those activities and use the counts as performance measures. That, however, turns out to be a mistake. Actual arrests and prosecutions are mostly costs rather than benefits.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s an interesting notion, but I think that he ignores one key point.<\/p>\n

The audience for crime control isn’t just criminals, it is the citizens who use the state’s ability to protect them as a measure of the legitimacy they grant the state.
\nThis is, for example, kind of crucial in solidifying (or, better, creating) the legitimacy we’re seeing in Iraq.<\/p>\n

The consequence of losing that legitimacy looks like this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Maria del Refugio Perez is a 60-year-old street vendor who says she abhors violence. But this month, she joined a raging mob that corralled, pummeled and hog-tied a suspected thief and almost burned her alive.<\/p>\n

Drawn by a butcher’s shouts that she had caught the woman grabbing money from a cash drawer at her shop, Perez and other neighbors quickly seized her. Once the church bells in this Mexico City suburb started ringing, signaling a town emergency, the mob grew in size \u2014 and anger.<\/p>\n

“These things happen because the authorities don’t do anything,” Perez said, recalling days later how the woman, Juana Moncayo, was tied to a flagpole in the town plaza for several hours as the crowd of 200 insulted and beat her.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An orderly society not only requires some control over who gets to use force and in what conditions; more important, it requires a public sphere of justice and respect for the law.<\/p>\n

The risk of a formulation like Kleiman’s is that we may decide not to punish certain criminals, because for us as a society, it is as Kleiman suggests simply too expensive (we do that today – ever try and report an auto burglary in a major city?). Kleiman says:<\/p>\n

[Putting someone away is a benefit when an especially active bad guy gets locked up, preferably for a long time, thus reducing criminal victimization through incapacitation, but the median person who goes to prison isn’t actually worth locking up, balancing the costs — financial and non-financial — of keeping him behind bars against the benefits of the crimes he doesn’t commit while incarcerated.]<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In making that calculation, he needs to add to the costs the erosion of the legitimacy of the overall body of laws in the eyes of the victimized noncriminal class.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post suggesting that one of the key metrics we’re using in law enforcement – the number of people convicted – is the wrong one. But what police and prosecutors do from day to day is make arrests and secure verdicts (or guilty pleas) and thus sentences. It seems natural to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}