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Cops less likely to arrest if their shift is about to end

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31985#fromrss

Arrests made near the end of an officer's shift typically require overtime work, and officers respond by reducing arrest frequency but increasing arrest quality. Days in which an officer works a second job after their police shift have higher opportunity cost, also reducing late-shift arrests.

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reducing arrest frequency but increasing arrest quality.

I know spergs are gonna try to make this into some stupid general point, but thats both obvious and meaningless.

The arrests that might stick or might not, are of course going to be the ones cops wont do if it means overtime, because the chance that they do overtime for nothing is not worth it.

Instead what remains are the arrests for serious crimes where even 1 minute before their end of the shift, the cops have no alternative to arrest the suspect.

Arrest frequency and quality arent independent variables, changing one always has an impact on the other.

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>Arrest frequency and quality arent independent variables, changing one always has an impact on the other.

The paper does in fact know that, and is not trying to imply otherwise:

Taken together, the results suggest that officers have an aversion to overtime work, expressed through an in-crease in the threshold used to make an arrest. This finding is consistent with work by Chan (2018) showing a “slacking off” effect for emergency-room doctors. The increase in court convictions from late-shift arrests suggests that officers value arrest quality at the margin, disproportionately abating lower rather than higher-quality arrests

 

Some observers have also raised the particular concern that overtime pay might incentivize officers to make low-quality late-shift arrests in order to secure access to overtime pay, a practice known as as “collars for dollars” (Moskos, 2011). Our study is the first empirical assessment of the collars for dollars hypothesis, which we examine within a larger evaluation of officers' on-the-job preferences.

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