Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Incentives

It's a truism in Management that incentive plans are hard to get right.  People won't do what you want them to, they'll do what you reward them to do.  If you don't have very good alignment between your wants and their paycheck, your people will do the craziest things.  Even when they're smart.

Especially when they're smart.

Via Say Uncle, we find a Detective who got a search warrant based on his affidavit that the suspect in question was already in prison.  Hilarity ensues:
A California couple can sue the detective whose faulty warrant set off an early morning SWAT team search of their home for their already incarcerated son, the 9th Circuit ruled Friday.

...  The team showed up at 5:30 a.m. with flash-bang grenades, burst into the home and pointed their weapons at the Bravos and their 8-year-old grandson, who ran screaming into the bathroom, the ruling states. The officers left after Hope Bravo showed them a recent letter from her son, mailed from prison.
Now I don't for a minute believe that Detective Tanore is an idiot.  I don't for a minute believe that he isn't detail oriented.  While being a Police Officer and being an idiot are not necessarily mutually exclusive, that's not where the smart money bets if you want to get promoted to Detective.  The idiots get to spend their careers writing tickets.

Instead, I suspect that Detective Tanore was working the incentive structure which was set up by his department.  I suspect that Federal and State policies (especially the "War on Certain Drugs") influenced that incentive structure.

The comments over at Uncle's are expectedly pungent, running towards the "tar and feather" solution for the Detective.  And the Judge who signed the warrant.  Me, I can't really argue with any of that.

However, the system is the system, and it will continue to produce outcomes like this.  Ostensibly smart people will continue to act like idiots, because that's how the incentive structure is set up.  From the Fed.Gov, to the State.Gov, to the Local.Gov, there is a menu of funding choices that leads to the sort of corners being cut that were cut here.

Perhaps Detective Tanore and Judge Cooper should be hounded from their professions.  But their places will be filled, and not by evil people.  Rather, they will be replaced by smart people working inside an incentive structure guaranteeing more of the same.

The system has to go.

7 comments:

Derek Simonds said...

I tell my clients all the time. If you want to change behavior change the pay plan or incentive structure. Show me a pay plan and I can usually predict the breakdowns in process because of it.

Great point.

Red said...

Federal funding and thus federal control of all US police forces is one of the most counter productive things to ever happen.

Case in point: Neighbor has his place robbed. Cops don't even bother coming out to take a police report. They don't check for finger prints or look for clues on who might make a specialty of these type of break ins. To the cops it's not worth their time. They do however have the money and the personal to fly a helicopter around every single night looking for drug houses they can raid. Another friend of mine lives in a house that used to belong to a drug deal and at least once a month the chopper will sit over his house for 20-30 mins seeing if there lots of people coming and going.

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

Problem: Cobras are biting the poor charges of the British Colonial Bureaucrats. Across India the poor and benighted indiginous peoples are getting envenomated. Something MUST. BE. DONE!

Solution: Put a sizable bounty on cobra heads in pounds sterling. More capable and intrepid natives will hunt down and kill the deadly pests, enriching themselves AND protecting the more helpless among them.

Result: Cobra bites go up, and not just among cobra hunters.

Reason: People are breeding cobras to turn in for the bounty.

Old NFO said...

Yep, look at I-10 across Southern Louisiana and the 'antics' of the cops down there... sigh...

Jake (formerly Riposte3) said...

"Tax the rat farms." - Lord Vetinari

TJIC said...

One way for the system to go is to tar and feather enough people (with HOT tar!) that large numbers of them stop showing up for work.

The drug war will not continue once 70% of the drug warriors realize that careers in plumbing or bookkeeping run a lower risk of citizens kicking in your door in the night, tazing you, tying you to a tree, and splashing roofing tar and pink My Little Pony fur all over you.

RG said...

You're making way too much sense, man.