Contemporary conceptions of the police and of the problems of policing in the United States have been shaped by the political upheavals and crisis of legitimacy that confronted all institutions of government in the 1960s. Recent research has focused attention on the structural aspects of...

We state efficiency conditions for the provision of congestable local public goods that diminish individual-specific proprietary risks. The optimum level of such a public service is determined by equating the sum of the reductions of the expected property losses due to a better service level...

We present evidence that more ethnically fragmented communities spend, all else equal, more on police services than less fragmented communities. We introduce a model of spending on police services which we use to interpret the data. In this model, we assume that the decision to commit a crime is...