Mainstreaming Methodology for Estimating Costs of Crime
The use of cost of crime estimates for summary measures of public safety can be mirrored also in their use in performance management and funding formulae.
The resources going into the police force in different parts of a country allocated from central or federal government are likely to vary with factors such as population, the age structure and the proportion of people living in urban conditions. But they usually also reflect the volume of crime an area experiences, with more resources going into areas with greater crime problems.
As with measures of public safety, the extent of crime problems can be measured more effectively using cost-weighted indicators than by pure volume measures. Governments can design the formulae for allocating resources across the criminal justice system to reflect cost differences between offence types explicitly or implicitly. At police force level, for example, this might result in more resources being moved to areas facing greater levels of high-cost offences at the expense of other areas experiencing mostly low-cost offences.
In England and Wales there has been a move to formalise the greater priority now being given to offence types with higher costs through the high level mechanism of Public Service Agreements.
Likewise, funding can be made proportional to losses measured in cost or volume terms. Provided that we assume that the capacity to reduce the costs of crime follows the initial distribution of the costs of crime, it will be welfare-maximising to make resource use proportional to the costs of crime in an area.
