False Proxies for Enforcement Distortions in "Policing for Profit" Research

Concerns about law enforcer incentives being a¤ected 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 en- forcer behavior. Because enforcer behavior is often unobservable, they rely on proxies like arrests or citations to infer distortions in behavior. I con- struct 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'