Joining the Regulatory Fold

T hepolice profession hasmuch to gain by recognizing its kinship with a broad range of regulatory professions. Law-enforcement agencies, security and intelligence organizations, and social regulatory agencies all exist primarily to protect society from a variety of harms. Such harms include crime, pollution, occupational hazards, transportation hazards, corruption, discrimination, various forms of exploitation, food contamination, terrorism, and risks from unsafe commercial products. The core task for such organizations is to identify harms, risks, dangers, or threats of one kind or another, and then either eliminate them, reduce their frequency, mitigate their effects, prevent them, or suppress them, and, by so doing, provide citizens higher levels of safety and security. Agencies with risk-control tasks at the core of their mission are a special breed, and can learn a great deal from one another. They are fundamentally different from the other half of government, which provides citizens with services such as education, health care, welfare, or public transportation systems. Enforcement and regulatory agencies accomplish their task principally by constraining the behavior of citizens or industry. They deliver protection fromharmprimarily through the delivery of obligations, and they use the coercive power of the state to back up that delivery! Theymay, on occasions, restrict business practices, seize property, suspend licenses, and even deprive individuals of their liberty or life. Not surprisingly, given their use of such powers, these agencies are scrutinized and criticized more for their uses and abuses of power than for their uses and abuses of public funds. The price paid by society—in terms of governmental intrusion, loss of liberty, and imposed restrictions—has to be worth it in terms of risks reduced, harms prevented, or dangers mitigated.