Sleaze in LA Federal Prosecutors Office

Since bureaucracies do not operate with free market incentives, there is no objective way to measure their success or failure. Instead of being measured by profits, bureaucracies measure success by their size and reach. Unlike a profit maximizing business, a bureaucracy wants bloat. Efficiency is a dirty word to a bureaucracy. If they get too efficient they might cease to matter, or, even worse, they might not get to suck up as many tax dollars as before.

So a bureaucracy – any bureaucracy - will rely on proxies for efficiency and end up with workers gaming the measured metrics.

In this case, the prosecutors office concentrated on easy cases to hit their numbers. It remains unclear how many weak cases were pushed through for the sake of quotas:

U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien is facing sharp criticism from prosecutors within his office who say he is pressuring them to file relatively insignificant criminal cases to drive up statistics that make the office eligible for increased federal funding.

The prosecutors said O'Brien's effort to increase filings amounts to a quota system in which lawyers face possible discipline and other career consequences if they fail to achieve their numbers.
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The disgruntled prosecutors in Los Angeles say they are now spending an exorbitant amount of time working on less significant cases -- mail theft, smaller drug offenses and illegal immigration -- to reach quotas. They cited the recent disbanding of the office's public integrity and environmental crimes section, a unit with a history of working on complex police corruption and political corruption cases, as evidence of a shift toward high-volume, low-quality prosecutions.

"It's all about the numbers," one prosecutor said.

One former supervisor put it this way: "I can't remember how they sugarcoated it, but the feeling around the office was, if you got your quota, then you could work on your real cases without being hassled."