Enforcement Engineering: Conceptual Exploration for New Engineering Discipline

The determination of where, when, how, and which laws to enforce is as varied as the number of police officers on the street. Traffic enforcement decisions range from macroscopic choices such as resource allocation at the organizational level to the microscopic options individual officers have in dispensing tickets. Everything between those extremes speaks to the proposition of where, when, and which laws to enforce, with the stated objective of reducing crashes. The concept of “engineering” traffic enforcement implies the use of scientific principles to guide the full range of enforcement decisions so as to evolve stated safety intentions into definable safety objectives. This approach offers the potential to create greater efficiency and effectiveness for enforcement agencies, which is important in an age of fierce competition for public dollars. The framework of enforcement engineering consists of information-driven problem identification, the application of evidence-based solutions, and the use of empirical performance measurement. This paper advances a conceptual exploration for enforcement engineering to promote more targeted, effective, and defensible traffic enforcement.