PRIVATE POLICING
There are already more private security employees than police, policing is going private anyway. Communities are developing that police themselves :sometimes they are walled often they have private surveillance, telephone answering when you are out and even group insurance (which is 60% cheaper in such areas.)
All the new private police need is powers of arrest. The ability of any citizens to arrest is essential to an effective policing system. In other words its necessary that anyone apprehended and asked to come to a place for trial would need to come no matter who asked him. If he turned out to be wrongly charges then the arrestor or arresting company would have to pay all his expenses (which could be quite expensive ) perhaps this could be moderated if there was reasonable cause to think the man was guilty. This isn't entirely new , De Toqueville in Democracy in America talked about how private citizens formed committees to catch criminals. . Scholar Rousas Rushdoony notes "The police power of the citizenry rests in Deuteronomy 22:1-4 ,24. When a neighbour's property went astray or was lost or when a man or woman raised the cry of distress, every man had a duty to answer that cry and enforce the law. All citizens have the right of arrest to this day in the United States as a result of this Biblical heritage" ( some states only for felonies, others for misdemeanors too).In Germany, too, persons failing to assume police powers to defend others can be fined from $1.25 to $2500 (1967 figures ) "France and Italy have similar laws" (5)
This procedure needs to be carefully controlled of course. The arrested should have the right to take someone with him - to avoid himself being kidnapped.- and to inform people what is happening. Certain standard procedures could be put in place to stop the system being abused. However certainly giving everyone this power and the independent forces against crime that this would create would go a long way to solving our current crime problem.
Privatizing policing and powers of arrest for every citizen is a way of effectively increasing the number of police both through the emergence of professional private forces and through ordinary citizens with other jobs using these powers from time to time. More police per head of population does significantly decrease crime. Using the statistics quoted in the Economist of Nov 1st 1997 across 8 European countries the correlation between the population per policeman and reported crime per 1000 is a massive 0.89. Visitors to Spain who note the profusion of gunned policemen will perhaps not be surprised to learn they have one of the lowest crime rates in Europe- half of France's rate and a quarter of that in Britain. However increasing the number of public sector police is not in itself enough without increasing their incentives for catching criminals. Mexico has far more police than Spain double per head yet the crime rate is far higher since the police have no incentive to catch criminals and unlike in Europe can get away with following their incentives. Furthermore Britain increased spending by 88% in real terms in the 80s yet clear up rates tumbled and people started to buy alarms instead (£510 million in 1991). With only 7% of all crimes (reported or not)leading to a person being charged (2/3rds currently don't report) , it is imperative to give people more incentives to report and police more incentives to catch a criminal.
POLICE FUNDED BY PENALISING THE CRIMINAL
The system would work best if convicted criminals were made to pay the costs of their capture as well as any restitution that they would pay to their victims.. This would give them an incentive to turn themselves in. And after all, who better to pay for the costs of crime than the criminal. .A call would go out for the person to turn themselves in within a few days and if they did not then the clock would start ticking. This would be an anonymous call in most case of course since the identity of the criminal would not be known.
The rest of the police costs would be paid for by insurance that people would take out that would pay the company doing the chasing if they weren't caught and also preferably if they were also. To give the private police the incentive to catch them. People would naturally prefer forms of insurance that paid more to the force that caught the criminal and less in they didn't.
POLICING HAS ALL THE INEFFICIENCIES OF ANY NATIONALISED INDUSTRY
Its not really too surprising how few people the police catch and the high cost of each conviction. The cost of convicting one person in the UK is £16,000 ,this is derived from the £8 bil police budget nationwide divided by half a million convictions. Indeed it is no more surprising than that British Telecom before privatisation had a waiting list of people to connect or that those who distributed food in the old USSR were not known for their customer service.A state police force is similarly inefficient - some British forces spend up to 60% of their budget on managers rather than bobbies on the beat. (Economist July 3rd 93 p35) Like any public utility its a question of incentives. When something is not owned privately no one has any motive to be efficient. What does each individual police man gain from catching the next criminal, what does the police force as a whole gain ? On the other hand in a privatised system everyone has something to gain by catching criminals and with the penalties being higher , crime simply wouldn't pay for the criminal. It would pay for the private police forces that would spring up who would gain payments, paid for by the convicted criminal ,on the instructions of the court, for every criminal they caught.
Consider thefts and burglary- the most common types of crime. At the moment the thief is unlikely to be caught and if he is caught he is unlikely to be tried quickly and thus the penalties are distant from the crime, if he is tried and found guilty he is likely to get a few months in jail at the very most and he gets to keep his ill-gotten gains. Since he probably wasn't employed , he won't loose a job. Crime pays, why are we surprised that it's increasing.
On the other hand in our alternative system, if he steals he is far more likely to get caught since people have an incentive to catch him, anyone who knows him has an incentive to turn him in, as the police force could remunerate him and claim it back from the criminal. Because justice is greatly expanded his trial is virtually immediate so the penalties are very quick. If he is found guilty he will pay back between 2 and 4 times what he stole plus the court costs plus the costs of catching him. Crime doesn't pay.
I have lived in and ran a charity in an area wherein some of the house-breakers and car thieves of the city live and I have become friends with some in attempting to help them. These people calculate gains and losses like everyone else and they find that crime pays for them. In fact once they develop the requisite skills it is the most remunatory form of work they can do. Until we change that we cannot expect to see drops in crime.
KNOWN CRIMINALS AND NEW INCENTIVES
In the privatised system it would even pay people to set up crimes for known criminals. In other words the police (or any citizen) could leave a car with the keys in the ignition with a tracking device attached. If the criminal was tempted and stole the car then the vehicle could be immobilised remotely and the criminal apprehended. He would then have to pay back at least the price of the car (plus the return of the original car) and might have to be sold as a debt servant to do so. Once this had happened to him a time or two he might reconsider whether stealing cars is really worth it ( as it certainly can be in our current system). This is just one example how private initiative would minimize crime in a way the public system never could, other ideas would occur to others as long as there was money to be made out of catching criminals at the criminals expense.
PROTECTING THE INNOCENT
Innocent people should still be protected in our system, private police forces would have to compensate anyone who turned out to be innocent on a fairly generous basis for their time lost and inconvenience though with an expanded judiciary this would not be huge. I would think also that arrested people should have the right to take with them another person, perhaps an officer of another police force or similar, to prevent kidnappers claiming citizens arrest powers in order to kidnap people. Expenses if any for this would be paid for by whoever lost the case, police or criminal.
Violence against the person -wounds and murders- although less common is more serious and private incentives would help here too. There is no financial restitution in this case but criminals would still have to pay for the costs of catching them which would give everyone who knows anything about the crime a financial incentive to "stick him in". All these costs would ultimately be borne by the criminal, the only risk the private police force takes is having to pay for them if the criminal is not caught.
COSTS
Police costs are £7999 million per year ,prisons £1760 million per year in the UK ( $28 billion in the US. (less per head than the UK ).At 1.5 million conviction per year that's £5500 per guilty verdict (UK ) and that including motoring offenses. If we restricted it to the 500,000 summary offenses then that's £16,000 per guilty verdict. (but Costs are for UK and cases are for England and Wales so that should reduce it a bit) perhaps to £14000.
In some ways the system would bring this down : people would give themselves up rather than risk paying for the costs of their capture, lower numbers of cases and police choosing to share the rewards of capture with anyone helping to catch the criminal would bring this down. Police would be frank with people when crimes were unsolvable rather than run up costs. However costs would still be high and criminals would need to count this cost before they began.
CRIMINALS DO COUNT COSTS
In 1985 in Baltimore autothieves were specially scheduled for speedy trials and bail was set very high. Within weeks autotheft dropped 95%. The thieves moved to another city since the cost of crime meant it no longer paid since most stolen cars are sold for parts. In the states auto insurers are only allowed to raise premiums by a certain amounts which also helps to reduce incentives to solve crime , apart perhaps for the insurance companies. In Britain there was tough gun control in 1988 , legal ownership has fallen rapidly since then and crime involving firearms has increased rapidly. 5.3 to 11.1 in 1992 (Economist )
When Morton Grove, Illinois passed a handgun ban , Kennesaw, Georgia reacted by making it illegal for every head of household NOT to own a gun ! The media took note expecting a Wild West style experience. However strangely crime dropped dramatically, the most recent homicide was in 1989 and that was with a knife. Burglaries per thousand has dropped from 11 to 3 .For some weird reason criminals don't seem to want to burgle when the household is armed ! .There has been no cases of domestic violence using guns or children being harmed
In America penalties are generally surprisingly lax , 56% of violent crimes no arrests, 50% of rapists spend <1 yr in jail, 60% of female victims murdered by people they knew, 180,000 rapes per year, same number as the number of breast cancers. Crime pays better in America more so there's more crime than in Europe.
REPORTED CRIME AND REAL CRIME
In Britain there were 5.1 million notifiable offenses in 1995 , 4,7 million (93%) against property (vehicle theft 1.3mil (26%) , burglary 1.2 mil (24%), criminal dam 18%, other theft 22%, Violent crime 6% (of which 22% robbery , 62% less serious wounding, 6% homicide , 2% rape, 8% other sexual offenses)
Yet there are three times as many domestic burglary committed as recorded, 4 times as many bicycle thefts and thefts from vehicles, 4 times as many woundings, 8 times as many robberies and thefts from persons) So in many cases the police aren't even getting to try and solve crimes- more evidence that crime pays today. With restitution people are given incentives to make the effort to find the criminal and bring him to justice.
CURRENTLY
82% pled guilty at the crown court to burglary, 91% to summary offenses,45% to sexual offenses 44% of those pleading not guilt were convicted
By far most common penalty is a fine : 1,070,000 out of 1,429,000 , imprisonment 60,000, community service 48,200, conditional discharge 102,000, probation 46,000 Fines are levied for 90% of motoring offenses and 83% of non motoring summary offenses, but only 30% for indictable offenses, 30% of those found guilty had no previous convictions, 18% had been convicted on more than 10 occasions
Cautioning rates vary between 27 and 54%, again this wouldn't be the case in our system so criminals would know before acting that if they got caught they wouldn't get let off.
APPLICATIONS
The Czech Republic has a crime problem at the moment (6) ,tourists are being ripped off on currency exchange, drinks containing minimal amounts of alcohol and numerous other small measures .Private policing would help in their situation because for every conman there would be another person looking over him hoping to make money by catching him in a crime.
This would be especially effective in those developing countries with "corrupt" police who are as likely to want bribed as the bureaucracy. With numerous competing police forces there would be a financial incentive for corrupt police to be caught and made to pay back like anyone else. Currently , these police forces are not intrinsically incapable of catching criminals- Mexican police are very good at catching speeding cars because they are likely to get cash in hand - they just have no incentive to catch real criminals. Inefficient is the wrong way to describe them, they're are paid to be inefficient , that's why the system needs some private sector incentives. Even British police while fairly well respected compared to some , I have found pretty inefficient, in some cases. On one occasion I had an employee who tried to steal a significant amount of money from me by forging a cheque. It was obvious she was guilty as there were witnesses and she was the only one who had access anyway. However 18 months later, there was still no advance on the case. That would never happen in a private system
. But other police forces are a little worse than this. We mentioned the Mexican force previously. While I was there the last time o it was discovered that some of the police had been employing workmen to dig an underground tunnel , in the direction of the bank ! Apparently this is not unusual in Mexico!
This is the effect of week incentives with a vengeance. Not only does crime pay but preventing it doesn't , under the current system.
PENALTIES
I would hold for crimes against property ( over 92% of all crimes) a system of restitution is more effective and more just than a prison system. In other words if a man steals £100, he pays back £200. If he has disposed of the goods and they need to be recovered he would pay back up to £400 and if he steals something needed for work and productivity is lost then he pays for that too. In other words he bears the full costs of his actions. This payment goes to the victim, which means victims have an incentive to ensure his capture and to prosecute. This is important since it would increase both the number of crimes reported and the number of caught criminals that were prosecuted. It also means that the criminal will only gain if he is successful more than 80% of the time ( for the £400 fine). A privatised police force would make sure that he wasn't. Counting the cost of the paying for the police ( which the criminal would be paying for if caught) , then he would need to be successful an even higher amount of the time.
What if he has no money? This is where debt service is absolutely indispensable for any effective system to work. If a person was in debt through crime then he could be force by the judge to work to pay back his debts. At a low enough rate it would be profitable for some employers to employ such people. Greater penalties would await any thus convicted that refused to work. . This deals with a lot of social problems including thieves paying for their crimes and people who didn't insure themselves paying for their medical expenses.
This is clearly a very effective way of converting do- nothing people into productive citizens. After his 6 months of service the man would have skills and disciplines he didn't have before . And the custom, for such people in the past, was to send him out with enough to set up in business on his own.
Those who ran away , would have to pay the costs of their capture . These kind of penalties are not unknown today :in Mexico thieves pay 15 times what they steal In the constitution the government is supposed to reimburse the victim out of this but this doesn't happen in practice (the benefit of this is not felt because the police lack incentives to catch anyone, quite the reverse) The Aztecs also had the practice of making people work for their victim rather than imprisoning him, some entered this state voluntarily to pay off their debts or simply because they preferred the freedom from economic worries this entailed. (8)
This is not the place to discuss the full benefits of capital punishment (see the website for more) but where the penalties are used frequently and swiftly on conviction such as the Middle East and the Far East crime rates are extremely low. It is necessary to ensure sufficient safeguards against wrongful conviction but that can be easily done. The most effective would be to insist on at least two witnesses ( collaborating evidence) in all cases and to have a death penalty for those who lie in capital cases, removing cases of conviction wrongly because of false witness by the police or others. It is essential to any justice system that actually desires to decrease crime that the ultimate sanction was available for crimes like murder, rape, kidnapping, and for incorrigible criminals who had shown themselves by frequent convictions to be enemies of society and who had determined despite greatly increased incentives never to reform. The Philippines had abolished the death penalty in 1987 but brought it back in 1993 citing as the reason "breakdown in the social order".
Alert readers will have noticed that there is no room for prisons in our system. Criminals are either dead, or making restitution. Prisons were never a good idea on principle since citizens are paying twice for the crimes, once in the crime itself and then to keep the criminal in prison. Furthermore the main active function of prisons has been to train new criminals to be more effective and to give them many more contacts than they had before. Those who have been to prison tend to reoffend. On the other hand by forcing people to work instead then we can reintegrate people with the habits of responsible society. High penalties and effective police forces have to go together, one or other is not enough. In the eighteenth century there were extremely high penalties for small offenses ( shooting a rabbit was a capital offense). But the policing was dire " the watchmen, chosen out of the poor, old, decrepit people... armed only with a pole " (Age of Voltaire p160 Durant) Predictablity is also important. The World bank found strongly negative correlations between corruption and predictability. Its not difficult to see why 64% of criminals come from the lowest 20% of the IQ distribution, the average IQ is only 84. Criminal sanctions have to be simple and predictable to be effective, the current complexity can only add to the crime levels.(9) MORE JUDGES
Moving on to the expansion of the judiciary. This is necessary for the swift exercise of justice and also to provide an alternative to today's costly regulatory systems In ancient Israel 13% of the families supplied a judge(6) Today less than 1 in 2000 are judges. This is why cases are not dealt with quickly, its also why the system is expensive. Most importantly, it moves the penalty for a crime away into the future in a criminals mind. If the criminal considering a burglary, thinks that if he is caught then two days later he will be experiencing the punishment then he may think again. This is especially true as criminals usually have a notoriously short time horizon, they don't take into account events that are too far in the future.
If there was one judge for every 45 people or so then this would effectively be a judge in each street so that people can arrest suspects and bring them to the judge for almost immediate justice. Shoplifters could be dealt with almost as soon as they were caught, so could burglars and car thieves Today sadly , the average time from offense to completion is about 130 days - almost 4 months. There are 872,200 convictions in the US for felonies, out of 250 mil people = 1 per 300 people per year. In one in 45 people was a judge ( 1 in 10 families) then that's only 7 cases per judge per year .
Because there were so many judges, the burden on each one would be small, perhaps one case every two months or so, operating on a rota system. This means they can do their own jobs as well so its not necessary to have a large paid judiciary. Each judge's expenses would be negligible because of the infrequency with which he was called. And it would be more and more infrequent as the message that crime didn't pay became better known.
If there were expenses to be paid they would be paid by the criminal.
. These costs would be relatively small however given the infrequency the judge was called
In the system I am proposing the law would be predictable - restitution as described above. This has two implication, firstly it means the justices don't need to be experts because the penalty would be straightforward, the only question is determining the guilt or innocence of the parties. This means the profusion of judges doesn't mean less effective justice. Secondly, being predictable is a major deterrent for criminals. The more they know what the penalty will be, without doubt or room for optimism, the less they will want to take part in the crimes.
In Britain 96% of the cases are administered in this way by 28,000 unpaid justices of the peace. It is an effective system and in this respect cost effective (the magistrates system England has easily the lowest legal bill of any developed country) . In the British system, sometimes cases go higher and become the responsibility of a paid judiciary . Similarly our army of judges would be arranged in a hierarchy of appeals courts with more experience judges dealing with the more difficult matters. The large numbers also gives the system great scope for specialisation. If someone's crime was related to financial services or civil engineering. It would not be difficult to find a judge with this background who would understand the nature of the crime in this context. Most crimes are not complicated however and can be dealt with by the lower courts. The predictability of the system is important so I think it would be beneficial to allow judges to be sued ( in higher courts) for failure to apply the prescribed penalty. The judiciary is a conservative institution usually however and we wouldn't expect this to happen too often.
BRITAIN TODAY
Of the 1996-7 , £3120 million spend on justice , half £1610 is on legal aid ( money given to lawyers to defend the accused ). If justice is swift and predictable there is no need or justification for this, although people would be free to hire one if they wanted. There would be no need to think about how to plead with respect to plea bargaining, or confessing to lesser crimes. The whole thing would be so much simpler. 10% is on Criminal Injuries £325 mil (which in our system would be restitution) So that leaves the total real spend on cases £1,140. Mil.
All figures below exclude Legal aid
Crown court( plus High Court of Justidiary in Scotland ) hear 90,000 trials a year (3HB) and costs £160 million that's £1800 a case ,this is for serious offenses like murder etc. Paid by the accusing police force or individual if the defendant turns out to be innocent or the defendant himself if he turns out guilty. Police would thus put pressure on criminal courts to lower costs ( to minimise cases where they lost ) This is worthwhile because it wouldn't be good if the National Union of Criminals and Hoodlums had to be formed to do the job. Magistrates courts including minor courts in Scotland cost £420 million that's about £210 per case. This would again be paid by whoever loosed the case, police force or accused. Its quite possible that with many magistrates costs per case would fall (in Britain ,there are 2-7 magistrates at each hearing which must put up costs)
Even at these levels the costs of going to trial are not excessive in the majority of cases - £210 is worth it to gain £1200 plus the £210 back if someone has stolen £300 in a burglary. In actual fact there are so many magistrates and they are used to infrequently that it would not be necessary to pay any remuneration.
Civil actions in the county courts which somehow manage to cost the state £225 mil should instead be paid for by the loosing party in the suit, as discussed below.
Crown Prosecution service- 340 mil, decides whether to prosecute a case brought by the police, in Scotland the Lord Advocate has responsibility for all prosecutions. ( the CPS performance statistics encourage them to drop cases without good chance of conviction- 150,000 cases dropped every year!) The crown prosecution service is a feature of the fact that the state currently is the one paying for justice. In the private system of the future, the choice would be with the victim whether or not to prosecute and with the incentive of multiple restitution would do so in most cases. Another reason why crime wouldn't pay for the criminal- there would be little chance of the case being dropped.
Civil Courts
Its even easier to see the benefit in civil courts being private. One party is in the wrong and it is right for that party to bear the court costs. It is not a bad thing for the courts to be able to compete against each other for business and in response to that information businesses can stipulate in their contracts particular courts that they believe embody fairness and good value for money. In fact there is no reason why any individual should not be able to open his own court and attract business for civil cases although he would need to be subject to the same penalties as criminal judges if he started to depart from the law in his judgments..
Most of the civil court cases are breach of contract or negligence. Specialised courts for different industries may be something industry would be prepared to pay for. We also need be aware that few cases for money owed go to trial, most settle out of court.
Divorce cases are clearly a civil matter unless criminal activity is alleged and if court proceedings are necessary costs should be borne by the guilty party.
ON THE SOCIAL CAUSES OF CRIME
Some may object that in reducing the rewards of crime I am ignoring the fact that crime comes mainly from the relatively poor but I have quite the reverse view, the fact that poorer people commit crimes is because crime pays relatively better for poor people. The rewards are better compared to welfare than they are compared to a reasonably well paying job. Any sensible (relatively) poor person without strong moral values is going to consider this if they run into the opportunity. The fact that the vast majority do not is proof enough that relative poverty doesn't cause crime, but nevertheless if crime pays then basic economics says its those without good jobs that it will pay relatively best for. Our job is to make it not pay so that the temptation never arises.
Poverty an any rate is clearly not in itself a main cause of crime since in the last 30 years while the west ( and even the poorer people in the west) have become richer and richer. Crime has got worse an worse. A simplistic correlation interpretation would suggest that the poorer people are the LESS crime there is. However this is as off base as the contrary, clearly crime increases because crime pays and that's what we need to address.
The key thing is that solving poverty will not necessarily solve crime if it still pays. Early on, Aristotle pointed out that while some steal for necessities, others steal for desires beyond this. Politics IIvii
HOW MUCH WOULD PRIVATISING JUDICIARY AND POLICE SAVE YOU
First it would save you the current cost to the state of £4 billion which over Britain's 20 million households is £197 per year. Then it would save you the price of crime which might be another £500 per year including cheaper goods and services, you would save £84 per year on not having to pay for prisons and £400 per year because the police costs would be mostly borne by criminals not by the citizen ( although there may also be some insurance cost to pay). Total £1170 per year.. This doesn't count the benefits from companies not loosing money from crime or the massive benefits from gaining back lost work and life costs, but these are included in the US costs below.
In the US: $78 billion is spent on criminal justice which is $39 billion on police, $29 bil on prisons, $10 billion on the courts. The private sector spends $596 billion which is $64 bil on private security, $202 billion (losses of life and work), crime against business $120 bil, stolen goods $60 bil, drug abuse $40, drunk driving $10 billion.
That means US citizens would save $430 pa on police, $315 on prisons , $105 on the courts. They would also benefit from the fact that private sector spending of $198 per household on stolen goods and other crimes against business . The private security crime makes necessary would greatly diminish and the massive $2300 bill for losses of life and work due to crime would translate into a sort of peace dividend when the private system is implemented. TOTAL : $3100 per household per year is yours when the privatised system arrives !
References
(1) Law
(2) The Law Machine
(3) Internet
(4) Government Pink Book
(5) Institutes of Biblical Law p466
(6) Ec Aug 6th 97: (7) (Exodus 18 ). (8) A guide to Mexican history p21 ed :Minutae Mexicana (9) The World Bank "The State in a changing world" p104 and Murray and Herrnsten "The Bell Curve" (1)