Violent Groups and Police Tactics: Should Tear Gas Make Crime Preventers Cry?

Panu Poutvaara and Mikael Priks

No 1639, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Democratic societies are challenged by various violent and organized groups, be they terrorists, gangs or organized hooligans. In exchange for offering an identity, leaders in such groups typically require members to be violent. We introduce a simple model to capture these stylized facts, and then study the effects of policing. We find that an increase in the marginal cost of violence always reduces violence, while increasing the indiscriminate fixed cost may backfire and result in smaller and more violent groups.

Keywords: violence; terrorism; gangs; hooliganism; supporter clubs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp1639.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1639

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().