Hooliganism and Police Tactics

In this paper, we introduce a model of hooliganism to study how different types of policing can be expected to affect violence and the number of hooligans in violent supporter clubs. Hooligans differ in their preferred level of fighting, and obtain utility also from social identity that belonging to a supporter club gives. We find that an increase in discriminative policing, like intelligence units, always reduces violence. Indiscriminate policing, such as the use of teargas or random jailing of potential law breakers, may, however, backfire and result in smaller and more brutal groups.