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Our current law enforcement policy is a get-tough law enforcement policy. It emphasizes
punishment. It emphasizes detection of people who break the law. The ideas that I talk about in
my work really look at the other side. And the other side of the question recognizes that most
people obey the law most of the time, and that includes criminals, actually. And the question
is, why? Why do people obey the law? Do they obey the law because they fear the consequences of
failing to do so, or do they obey the law because they think it’s the right thing to do, or
because they think that government agents, or — specifically in my case — police officers,
have the right to dictate to them proper behavior?It turns out, research shows, that it’s
overwhelmingly the latter — that people obey the law because they think it’s right, or because
they think that government agents have the right to tell them what to do. And when you embrace
that idea, you find that you can achieve compliance that’s longer-lasting, more pervasive, and
cheaper than the deterrence-based approaches that require the existence of a threat and a
following-through on it in every instance in order to achieve crime reductions.Importantly, this
does not mean that deterrence doesn’t matter. It’s important. It’s an important tool. The
point, however, is that if you organize your law-enforcement strategies to embrace legitimacy
and procedural justice as opposed to deterrence, you’ll get bigger *** for your buck.