Mainstreaming Methodology for Estimating Costs of Crime
In many countries there is a thirst for estimates of the costs of crime. Very often there may be little history in the country of efforts to construct systematic estimates. The result can be either individuals or organisations making educated guesses or pressure for setting up a project team to produce estimates.
The purpose of this section is to identify some of the key components that are needed to support the development of estimates. This ranges from suggestions about the typology of offences to use and possible sources of statistical data to advice about the scope for making use of estimates made for other countries.
When making your own estimates of the costs of crime it is a good idea to follow the standard approach which has been used on this site. This make it much more likely that you will produce the kinds of estimates that will be useful to domestic criminal justice policymakers. But it will also leave some important gaps, such as crime against business and international and trans-border crime. These broader topics are approached in the same way but need further specialist data sources and methods.
It should be stressed that making good cost of crime estimates is a continuing process even if it benefits from the work of a special project team initially. The widening and updating of data sources enables steady development and improvements to components for which only a crude methodology was used when making initial estimates.
