Suppression at one point displaces the activity to another rather than reducing it.
From the arcade game, and adopted in criminology as crime displacement. The policy question is always whether suppression reduces the activity or relocates it, and the two look identical locally.
In practice
- A council clears a fly-tipping site and the same volume appears on the lane half a mile away within the month.
- A firm blocks one file-sharing site on its network, and the traffic is back through three others by Wednesday.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- The paradoxes of democracy and the quips of partisans