Estimates of Law Enforcement Costs by Crime Type for Benefit-Cost Analyses

Abstract

Crime is an important outcome in many social policy evaluations. Benefits to society from preventing crime are based on avoiding victimization and freeing criminal justice system resources. For the latter, analysts need information about the marginal cost of policing for different types of crime across jurisdictions; however, this information is not readily available. This paper details key economic concepts relevant to law enforcement services, and then combines publicly available police expenditure data with insights from observational and time-diary studies to generate state-level, crime-specific, average variable cost estimates for crimeresponse services conducted by police by crime type. Since there is considerable uncertainty concerning various parameters underpinning these calculations, we use Monte Carlo simulation methods to incorporate the uncertainty into our estimates. This study finds that the U.S. population-weighted average variable cost of law enforcement response per police-reported Part 1 violent crime is $10,900, ranging from $6900 to $15,400 at the 10th and 90th percentiles, respectively. For a Part 1 property crime, the equivalent figure is $1300, with a range from $700 to $1700.

Breaking the chain: How arrests reduce the probability of near repeat crimes

“…Improving clearance rates for serious violence is not impossible (Braga & Dusseault, 2018) and is also expected to have downstream effects of improving perceptions of police as well (Braga, Brunson, & Drakulich, 2019). These estimates of crime reductions can potentially be used to justify increased detective resources, especially given the costs associated with serious violence (Hunt, Saunders, & Kilmer, 2019). Beyond policing, it is possible that community outreach violence interrupters also reduce the probability of retaliatory violence (Butts et al, 2015), and their effectiveness could be determined in a similar manner to the analysis we have conducted here.…”

“…The same rationale could be applied to devoting more investigatory resources towards solving instrumental crimes of theft from motor vehicles and burglary, but those crimes tend to have a much lower cost to the police (Hunt et al, 2019). As prior work suggests police departments already take quite seriously shootings and near repeat robberies (Haberman & Ratcliffe, 2012;Wyant, 2014), it may be the case that other cost-effective strategies will be needed to improve arrest rates to prevent near repeat crimes.…”

Redrawing Hot Spots of Crime in Dallas, Texas

“…For cost of crime estimates, we use the Texas specific estimates presented in Hunt, et al (2019). Table 1 lists the descriptive statistics, as well as those cost of crime estimates per UCR offense.…”

“…As opposed to using crime harm estimated via sentencing decisions, we take a different tact in this analysis; we use estimates of costs of crime relevant directly to a police department. Hunt, Saunders, and Kilmer (2019) chose to calculate crime specific variable cost estimates (for police departments) to aid in cost-benefit analysis. Using this type of data to construct hot spots, instead of focusing on sentencing guidelines and punishment, can directly relate to the benefits of reducing crime in that area that are directly realized by police.…”

“…The second novel contribution of this work is to construct hot spots using weighted harm scores (Ignatans & Pease, 2016;Ratcliffe 2015;Sherman, Neyroud, & Neyroud, 2016;Macbeth & Ariel, 2017). To do this, we use average Uniform Crime Report (UCR) cost of crime estimates (per law enforcement) for Texas as weights in the DBSCAN algorithm (Hunt, Saunders, & Kilmer, 2019). This provides more interpretable hot spot summaries in terms of direct cost of crime estimates relevant to police departments.…”