Privacy, Transparency, and Policing

Résumé

Agents face heterogeneous returns to crime, or their types, and decide whether to commit a crime. Police acquire information about agents' types and search them to deter and uncover crimes. If information acquisition is publicly observable, the police will acquire partial information that prevents the police from identifying agents with high returns to crime. If the police can covertly acquire information, the police will acquire full information. In this case, the resulting equilibrium exposes all agents to higher search intensities but is associated with a higher crime rate than the transparency regime. The results underscore the importance of transparency in data collection by law enforcement agencies.