Policeman in front of parked cars

Let the Games Begin - an Example for Privatized Law Enforcement

When debating anarchy, people are often stunned when I mention ideas like privatized military, law enforcement, or judicial systems. Here is an idea for improving the enforcement of parking tickets along most dimensions.

Currently, police is charged with the task of finding cars that are parked incorrectly and fine them. Nowadays, the process involves humans and walking through the streets on patrol. Upon finding a car, they take photos with their app, which triggers the process of fining the owner of the car.

The law enforcement process has several dimensions in which we want to measure it:

1. Making money: let’s face it, collecting fines from citizens is a source of income for cities — and one of the few that they can vary.
2. Ensure fairness and safety: laws are in place for a reason. While a lot of laws are debatable, those concerning the parking of cars mostly try to ensure safe and fair streets.
3. No type 1 errors: There are multiple reasons for correct law enforcement. Type 2 errors (not fining offenders) are ok, but type 1 errors (fining people without misconduct) is closely monitored by courts and the public. Type 1 errors are to be avoided — even at high costs.

So, how does the current process measure up?

1. Making money: This work is most likely profitable. Assuming costs of 60€/h, and average tickets of 30€/ticket he only needs to find 2 tickets per hour to break even. BUT: From my own experience, I can say that only a very low number of possible tickets are filed. So, cities could easily double or triple their revenue if they found better ways to fine people (either by hiring more or otherwise).
2. Ensuring fairness and safety: Not so good, most people will never be caught for their wrongdoing. Assuming the laws are directly correlated with fairness and safety, this means the inability to enforce them leads to high unfairness. Bike lanes are parked on, exits are blocked and traffic flow is inhibited. This causes anger, delays and potentially deaths. The current system fails to deliver on the laws it imposes and hence is unfair and unsafe. Additionally, one could also go so far as to say that there is an unfairness in only being caught occasionally because two offenders might get a different treatment.
3. No type 1 errors: Fairly good. The slowness of the process and the high HR expenses ensure a fairly high loyalty and consistency of the police and other regulatory agencies. However, there are still countless cases of people fighting their cities over wrong fines. Misaligned incentives and only a single person making the decision could have lead to this.

Overall, the current system is close to no enforcement at all (probably depends on the city, but in Berlin, it is common to risk parking fines because they are low and unlikely).

The solution: outsourcing law enforcement to the public through an app

Imagine every citizen could download an app, take photos or videos of offending vehicles, and get paid for this work. The payment could be a commission fee (e.g. 30% of the fined value). To hedge against wrongful claims, here are some suggestions:

• Fines can be contested by the offender. If a fine is found to be wrong, the app user is punished or at least they are punished if this happens too often. Video and photo evidence should be helpful in documenting cases.
• At least 2 users need to verify a claim by taking a picture. A map could display offenders that still need to be verified (only one person documented the incident so far), so more users find those cars. The fee is then split between both people. A more advanced version could disallow verifying the incidents of the same person, so you don’t team up with a friend and wrongfully fine tons of people together.
• Photo or video material is sent to countries overseas where it is reviewed by professionals (similar to other moderation forms e.g. social media).

How would this idea perform along the above-mentioned dimensions?

1. Money: Previously the costs were rather fixed and not so scalable. The app allows for a very scalable CAC (cost of acquisition), one can get 10 or 1000 offenders per day for the same cost per offender. The number of incidents will probably increase sharply. I think this can turn into a major, low-effort income source for municipalities. Of course, the number of offenses will decrease, as people will become aware of how much more likely they are to be caught. A new equilibrium of benefits of offending (saved time, etc.) and costs (likelihood of being caught * cost of being caught) will be established.
2. Ensuring fairness and safety: Assuming law correlates with fairness and safety in traffic, those two will go up significantly. The worst part of the current system will be cured by adding privatization. Contrary to common, European belief free markets do create value. Of course this might change once this concept moves to other laws, which are more debatable. I think this is rather unlikely though, as cars have the unique property of having number plates for identification and no direct contact with the offending person is necessary — which might turn violent otherwise.
3. No type 1 errors: This is the critical part, that will have to be fixed through the right incentives and predictive tech. Automated image analysis and other tech can be used to prevent fraud (which are type 1 errors).

I am strongly convinced that an app like this, supported by a government (local or national) would change things dramatically when it comes to traffic. One could imagine similar processes for e.g. speeding (using modern, multi-camera phones distance and hence speed can be computed).

This app would further free resources from the regulatory agencies, that can then focus on other, more serious problems — while having more money.

This is the magic of game theory: a small shift in incentives — and a large shift in the world.

Update on 2020–11–01

Status Quo

There is a range of apps that explore this idea, check them out:

• https://safelanes.org/
• https://citizen.com/

But these don’t pay you money, that’s why you never heard of them.