Thread by @JohnFPfaff

I'm always fascinated by the fact that private prisons--which hold ~8% of all people in prison--get SO much attention, while private policing gets comparatively almost none... even though we have MORE total private security (from mall cop to guys with guns) than public police.

Genuinely intrigued by the sorts of legal privatization that bother us vs those that don't.

And here?

Private security are likely MUCH more likely to create an entryway into the criminal legal system than private prisons (which just pop up at the end of public process).

I would also add that this throws a lot of our macro-level empirical research on policing into question. Private security are not randomly distributed, so omitting them from the measure of policing (which ~all models do) is... not at trivial issue.

And there's a real chance it means we UNDERSTATE the impact of policing.

Private security are often going to be where there is more risk of crime/less effective police (see @patrick_sharkey on BIDS, say). So crime would be higher still if just (measured) # of sworn cops there.

This thus creates the risk that we are understating the marginal impact of more police, bc the higher-crime areas have "lower" crime than they would with the law enforcement we measure, so the change we see going to higher-policed areas is less than if we accounted for privates.

Anyway, hard to work through biases on Twitter.

The point is we have a ton of private policing, we don't talk about it (strange), we don't measure it well (unsurprising), and we ignore it in our models (bad).