Additional law enforcement as a deterrent to criminal behavior: empirical evidence from the National Hockey League

This paper attempts to determine if changes in the number of law enforcement officers leads to a more significant change in petty criminal activity or in relatively more harmful criminal activity. Because of the number of potential infractions, the variation in sentence duration based on the ferocity of the offense, and the addition of a second official to games, the National Hockey League functions as a reasonable economic laboratory for this evaluation. In applying economic crime theory to game-by-game data, it is found that relatively major, potentially harmful offenses are deterred at a greater level than are petty rule violations.