The Social Benefits of Social Capital in Fire Fighting Units Contrasted with the Social Cost of Social Capital in Police Units

Fire fighters in a city such as Baltimore have a better defined job than the police.  Fire fighters do not set fires.  They put out fires and save those at risk.  Fires occur at random times in random parts of the city.

The quality of the fire fighting unit can be measured using;  1. time until the unit arrives on the scene.  2. time until the fire fighters put out the fire.  3. total cost for putting out the fire.

Each member of the fire fighting unit knows his role and the individual team members know whether other complementary members of the team did their job. 

A KEY POINT.  Once the fire breaks out, this is not a strategic game.  The fire is a passive foe that makes no strategic moves.   A good applied scientist should be able to almost perfectly predict its path.  When the police try to engage in prediction, their “R2″ will be much lower and this inability to predict what will happen next is the cause of many of our social problems. The police do not know the intentions of the specific person they are interacting with and turn to rules of thumb that have a much lower ex-post (R2) (i.e statistical discrimination often does not yield the right prediction).
The police have a much harder job because they interact with people (not fire).

I am guessing that after each fire, the team reviews their respective performance (like a NBA team watching game film) and figure out how to do better next time.  A good researcher could use data from #2 above to study unit specific learning by doing effects. In English, do more experienced fire fighting teams take less time to put out a similar quality fire?

Since fire fighters can die in the midst of a fire, they have strong incentives to weed out “bad apples” (those who do not know how to do their job) and to build up social capital within the unit and to build up productive human capital to fuel the unit’s adaptive skill. In this case, note that social capital within the unit actually helps society because it improves the quality of the organization’s ability to fight fires.   Dora and I explore group social capital in our Civil War work on desertion.

In the case of the Police,  social capital within the unit may be more likely to create an “us versus them” mentality and may help to protect “bad apples”.  The police have private information about their interactions with people that even body cameras cannot capture.  The patrol partner of a given officer observes this information but does he have the right incentives to report it up the chain of command?   Do captains have an incentive to identify “bad apple” units before a tragedy occurs? Will such top down questioning affect morale of the unit? I would ask readers to skim my recent Al Pacino Serpico piece.

We know little about the social interactions within police units.  Who is the “Alpha” who leads these units?  How did this person achieve this respect level?

So, the point of this blog post is that fire fighters have a single dimension job;  put out the fire.  The fire puts society at risk and it puts the firefighters at risk.  This creates an alignment of incentives such that society and the unit are both stronger if the firefighters are individually skilled and work well as a team.

Policing raises several issues at the frontier of economics related to game theory (the strategic interaction with the people the police are interacting with), asymmetric information (the police do not know who they are interacting with, the leadership of the police do not know what the officer is doing in a given situation),  and empirical work;   what is the causal effect of policing on actually reducing urban crime and reducing civic trust?

Fire fighting does not face these questions.   Has a sociologist studied who chooses to join the police versus the fire fighting department in a given city and what are the respective effects of experience in each of these cultures on individuals as time passes?

Who self selects to be a fire fighter versus a police officer?  How does experience in these organizations shape one’s values and world outlook?