The Demand for Police

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the estimation of a demand schedule for a public service–police protection. The paper's object is to determine the wage elasticity of demand for policemen, since if police demand is wage-inelastic, then police unions could have a powerful future. The paper follows a simple public choice framework by postulating a citizen utility function and income constraint in order to determine utility maximization conditions. It is shown that the quantity of policemen demanded–which was used as a proxy for police service–should be positively related to the citizen's income and wealth, and negatively related to the police wage. Further, other variables such as other government expenditures, crime rates, traffic congestion, and class status were also related to the police variable. The demand equation was estimated for a pooled, cross-sectional sample of California cities. Two-stage least squares was the estimation technique. Most of the signs of the significant variables were as anticipated. Especially interesting was the result that the demand for policemen is quite wage-inelastic.