Use of State Police Services for Local Policing: The Case of New Jersey

All states in the New England and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States provide State Police services without charge to municipalities without full-time local police departments. Efficiency and equity issues have resulted from this tradition and the development of local police departments or shared departments across neighboring municipalities in rural and exurban areas has been discouraged. These problems will diminish in scope as municipalities receiving the State Police subsidy opt out of the program and adopt local policing. We examine this potential by estimating models of the municipal decision to use the State Police for local policing among New Jersey municipalities with less than 15,000 population. We find that the elasticities of the decision to use the State Police for local policing with respect to population and median family income to be −1.1 and −2.3, respectively. If recent income and population trends in New Jersey municipalities using the State Police continue, our upper range estimate is that about 20 of the 90 municipalities using the State Police will opt out of the program in the next decade.