Mainstreaming Methodology for Estimating Costs of Crime
From a resource allocation perspective it is important to focus on the cost consequences of measures to reduce vulnerability to crime and its consequences as well as on the costs triggered by crimes themselves. These costs sometimes take the form of spending, for example on investment in locks or CCTV systems. Other times they involve risk-reducing behaviour, such as staying in rather than going out in the evening or taking time to bolt windows before going on holiday. Virtually all individuals and organisations will incur costs of this type.
In this section we look at four categories of cost related to the anticipation of crime.
Avoidance costs looks at the costs of security measures taken by individuals and businesses.
Fear of Crime by the Public looks at the developing field of finding ways of putting values on the losses resulting from fear of crime.
Government Crime Prevention Programmes looks at the elements of government programmes aimed at crime prevention. For many criminal justice (and other) agencies crime prevention activity may be difficult to separate out from activity that is in response to crime. Police, for example, play a public reassurance role and a crime reduction role as well as responding to crime. Strictly speaking our costing model should reflect this multi-purpose approach. But there are substantial practical barriers to this. It may be difficult to estimate the proportion of time going into preventive work as compared with ‘responsive’ work, and even if prevention can be isolated there is a question over how to allocate it across offence types.
Non-governmental Crime Prevention Programmes looks at efforts by non-government agencies including both individuals and business. These range from neighbourhood watch programmes (which rely on volunteer time that has a positive opportunity cost) to various kinds of business costs that may be very substantial. For example the expenditure by business on premises’ security, anti-virus software, employee vetting and security checking of financial transactions is substantial, although not easy to measure.
We note that the costs associated with insurance against loss from crime should really be included in this section, although in practice they are usually treated as part of victim costs.
The section concludes with a summary table, based on the Home Office work, with an illustrative breakdown of Costs in anticipation of crime by offence type and cost type.
