Ethnic Fragmentation and Police Spending: Social Identity and a Public Good

Abstract

We present evidence that more ethnically fragmented communities spend, all else equal, more on police services than less fragmented communities. We introduce a model of spending on police services which we use to interpret the data. In this model, we assume that the decision to commit a crime is a rational consideration of the costs and bene…ts and that spending on police services reduces the attractiveness of committing a crime. We ­