Social physics is a cool new science in which the eggheads use mathematical models to simulate the behaviour of large numbers of people. What these guys are finding is that very simple assumptions can reproduce hugely complex behaviours and they is using it to study everything from trading on the money markets to the spread of racism.
Now Mirta “Squirter” Gordon at the University of Grenoble in France is using the technique to study crime levels. Here’s the thinkin’: crime costs societies in many ways. But crime fighting is expensive too, cos a-huntin’ and a-chasin’ crims costs money.
So perhaps there’s a balance to be had: society could accept the cost of a small amount of crime and thereby save on law enforcement.
That would be an error, conclude Squirter Gordon and her colleagues. Their model assumes that people have an inclination to abide by the law that depends on the likelihood of being caught after committing a crime. So people are more likely to commit crime when they are less likely to be caught. Seems reasonable.
What happens when ya run the simulation is that the crime rate increases as law enforcement is cut and the chances of getting caught drop. So far so good-that’s kinda what ya expect.
But Squirter Gordon has found something else: a critical point at which a very small cut in law enforcement causes a massive increase in crime. In other words a phase change.
That’s has big implications. The community can save money by cutting law enforcement but once the critical point has been reached and crime soars, the cost of reducing crime levels again is huge.
The moral? Cutting law enforcement is a false economy.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.3751: Crime and Punishment: the Economic Burden of Impunity