Mainstreaming Methodology for Estimating Costs of Crime
An important component of police activity at the local level is ‘situational crime prevention’ or ‘target hardening’. Installation of CCTV systems covering car, lorry or bicycle parks, football stadiums and public transport stations, the indelible marking of property and the installation of security gates to prevent access to the rear of terraced blocks of housing are a few examples of the methods used to improve prospects of identifying (and thereby deterring) car thieves, vandals, terrorists, house burglars and other offenders.
Within geographically defined areas it is often possible to monitor recorded crime levels quite carefully, with the result that it becomes feasible to design experiments to measure the impact of specific crime prevention measures and thus to monetise benefits. There are often ‘complications’ such as the displacement of crime to adjoining areas, a switch to different types of offences and the likelihood that recorded crime figures underestimate the full scale of crime reduction effects, since unreported crime is excluded. But in essence such settings enable reasonable estimates to be made of the returns from projects in terms of their crime reduction effect.
The high (albeit falling) costs of CCTV systems have been a stimulus to cost benefit studies as equipment manufacturers (and their clients) seek evidence of positive project returns. Improvements in image clarity and the capacity to recognise objects and read vehicle registration plates have expanded capabilities and potentially the benefits from projects. Such technological change means that evidence of effectiveness has to be updated regularly.
A great deal of evaluation of such schemes has been conducted but much of it is of rather limited quality, particularly from an economic perspective. It is to be hoped that continuing pressure to produce credible evidence of effectiveness will result in improvements to methodology.
Illustrations of the methodology and its application to situational crime prevention can be found in the following study:
A study of burglary reduction projects in England & Wales.
