Police, politics, and public safety: Analyzing the incentives and efficacy of traffic enforcement

This dissertation is a collection of three essays that analyze and juxtapose the public safety and political interest components of law enforcement. In general, these sometimes conflicting interests can be extrapolated to other agents in the public sector, particularly those whose responsibility lies in protecting or ensuring public safety.;The remainder of the study focuses on the political economy of traffic enforcement. It is often presumed that police protect the public order. While this may be true, the public choice lens suggests another explanation; police officers face incentives and economics teaches us that incentives matter. teaches us that incentives matter. One particular motivation for law enforcement is to engage in behavior consistent with their political incentives, i.e. maximize budgets (Niskanen, 1968, 1971) and (Sherman, 1983). Using data comprised of 61 Florida counties and 12 years from 1999-2010, the results generally fail to support the hypothesis that traffic tickets written by local police officers are administered in response to local fiscal conditions. The pooled ordinary least squares estimator does find statistically significant evidence that there exists an inverse relationship between police spending and traffic tickets; police officers write more tickets when there is lower police funding. The theory presented in this study suggests that this behavior is an attempt to secure future funding and maintain a relevant source of government funding to the county. However, the more appropriate panel analysis incorporating fixed effects fails to find similar evidence.;The second study analyzes Red Light Traffic Cameras (RLCs) and poses the following question: Do RLCs increase public safety, or is there a revenue motive behind their adoption? RLCs are purported to increase road safety by reducing traffic crashes and motor vehicle fatalities, but the existing studies (Erke, 2009; Garber et al., 2005,2007) only analyze crashes at these intersections before and after the implementation of RLCs. This analysis fails to consider changes in driver behavior and changes through time. Also, RLCs may increase road safety for the entire county due to these changes in driver behavior. This hypothesis is tested using data comprised of 67 Florida counties for the two years during 2010 and 2011. The evidence suggests that counties with at least one RLC have less traffic crashes and motor vehicle fatalities.;The third study focuses on the relative efficacy of traffic tickets and road safety. One role of law enforcement is the protection of property rights and the promotion of public safety. Some studies suggest that law enforcement is an effective public policy option for reducing crime (Levitt, 1997; Klick & Tabarrok, 2004). traffic enforcement may also be an effective public policy. By writing traffic tickets and enforcing the rules of the road, police officers may increase safety by reducing traffic crashes. Two sources of data are used to test this hypothesis: the first is comprised of annual data for the 67 Florida counties during the years 1999-2010. The second source of data is made up of monthly crash data of the 67 Florida counties during 2010 and 2011. The results suggests that the relationship between traffic crashes and traffic tickets is ambiguous; the monthly data does suggest that traffic tickets reduce traffic crashes,but the annual data fails to find a similar result. This juxtaposition suggests that the results in the previous literature may be contingent on the type and length of the data used Lee (2011); Makowsky & Stratmann (2011).