McFreedom

I was reading Wired this morning, when I came across an interesting statistic. In the "Start" section, this month's "Inforporn" story is called "The Walls Have Ears," by Rebecca Harper. In it, she states, "The US spent about $68 billion on taps last year, arresting 3,683 people." Note: The link for that story doesn't go anywhere; it goes to where I think the story should be, but I've been unable to find it; perhaps they'll update it when they publish full content on 9/20/02; if not, it's on page 60 of the 10.10 (October, 2002) print magazine.

Being a suspicious reader of any news story about any study (well, any news story about anything but especially about studies), my first thought was, how much is that per arrest?.

$18.5 million per arrest. And she alludes that most of them were drug related. I know the government does some stupid things, but it was hard for me to imagine that they'd spend $18.5 million dollars just to catch a drug dealer. The original study appears to be this, from the Administrative Office of US Courts. A White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Study (which has serious flaws of its own, but those flaws aren't important for this discussion) stated that non-law-enforcement costs of drug use cost the US $98.5 billion in 1998. There were 1,579,566 drug-related arrests in 2000. That's an average economic cost per arrest of $623,589 per drug user. Even if we assume the average wiretap arrestee was the worst possible drug offender, and responsible for ten times the econmic loss of the average offender, we're still left with paying $18.5 million to avert $6 million in societal damage.

Of course, the answer is, Not even the government is that stupid. But apparently Wired is. The numbers given in the report state that, for the cases where cost was known (1,327 of 1,491), the cost was $48,198 per case, or a total of $71,863,218. Which is still a lot of money (basically $20,000 per arrest). But it's not a ludicrously insane amount of money.

I can't figure out where the error came from, either. It's not a simple order of magnitude anywhere. She didn't multiply twice or anything obvious like that.

I always like to put mistakes like this in context, because it shows how obviously the reporter and her editors were not thinking critically about the numbers they were seeing. The FBI's total budget for FY 2001 was $3.44 billion. Total Federal Spending on law enforcement was $34 billion in 2001. All levels of government combined - Federal, State and local - spent $146 billion on all law enforcement in 2000.

I'm not qualified to say whether the money we did spend on wiretapping was well spent; whether the criminals could have been caught more cost-effectively (or, given the cost of catching them, whether their largely drug-related offenses might be cheaper for society to ignore than to prosecute). But even I can see that it didn't take half of all the money we spent on law enforcement to wiretap 1,491 people.