Is your profiling strategy robust?

The economic theory of crime views criminals as rational decision makers, implying elastic response to law enforcement. Group-dependent elasticities can be exploited for efficient allocation of enforcement resources. However, profiling can augment both number of arrests and total crime since nonprofiled groups will increase their criminality. Elasticities are highly uncertain, so prediction is difficult and uncertainty must be accounted for in designing a profiling strategy. We use info-gap theory for satisficing (not minimizing) total crime rate. Using an empirical example, based on running red lights, we demonstrate the trade-off between robustness to uncertainty and total crime rate.