Police Patrols and Fire Alarms: An Empirical Examination of the Legislative Preference for Oversight

Over the past several decades, the police patrol-fire alarm dichotomy, and corresponding logic that legislators generally prefer fire alarms to police patrols, has been widely circulated and debated. Despite this attention, researchers have devoted relatively little attention to (1) distinguishing these forms of oversight empirically and (2) verifying that legislators utilize fire alarms more regularly than police patrols. We take up these challenges by establishing a set of decision rules for coding hearings as either event-driven or routine, ongoing legislative activities. We then employ this empirical distinction as a means of appraising the relative prevalence of police patrols and fire alarms in the United States Congress, both as a general matter as well as across chambers, committees, political parties, and election cycles. Our central finding is that hearing activity is predominantly police-patrol in orientation. Although this result suggests that legislators do not have a systematic preference for fire alarms over police patrols, such a conclusion can be stated only in the context of hearings, an undeniably important form of oversight.