What Cost-of-Crime Research Can Tell Us About Investing in Police

By: Paul Heaton

Many state and local governments are facing significant fiscal challenges, forcing policymakers to confront difficult trade-offs as they consider how to allocate scarce resources across numerous worthy initiatives. To achieve their policy priorities, it will become increasingly important for policymakers to concentrate resources on programs that can clearly demonstrate that they improve their constituents' quality of life. To identify such programs, cost/benefit analysis can be a powerful tool for objectively adjudicating the merits of particular programs. On the surface, all such programs aim to improve quality of life, but whether they actually achieve — or will achieve — what they aim for is another question. Summarizing the existing high-quality academic research on the cost of crime and the effectiveness of police in preventing crime, this paper familiarizes policymakers and practitioners with current research on these issues and demonstrates how this research can be used to better understand the returns to investments in police. It demonstrates a method for comparing the costs of police personnel with the expected benefits generated by those police in terms of reduced crime. Applying the method to several real-world scenarios shows that these investments generate net social benefits. Returns on investments in police personnel are likely to be substantial.

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This report is from the Rand Corporation. Tom

Security, At What Cost?

Quantifying people’s trade-offs
across liberty, privacy
and security

Neil Robinson, Dimitris Potoglou, Chong Woo Kim,
Peter Burge, Richard Warnes

Sponsored by the RAND Europe Board of Trustees

The heightened security environment in the United Kingdom today is resplendent with examples of government policy that must strike a delicate balance between strengthening security without jeopardising public liberties and personal privacy. The introduction of national identity cards and biometric passports, the expansion of the DNA database, and cross-departmental sharing of information raise a number of privacy issues. Civil liberties may be suspended by the exercise of stop and search powers by the police or detention of suspects prior to a trial. Much of the current privacy vs. security debate occurs at an emotional level with little evidence informing the argument. This report outlines the results of a stated preference discrete choice modelling study that sought to objectively understand the real privacy, liberty and security trade-offs of individuals so that policy makers can be better informed about individuals true preferences in this domain. Three real-life case studies were investigated where these factors come into play; applying for a passport; travel on the national rail network and attendance at a major public event such as the opening ceremony of the Olympics. A panel of internet users demographically weighted to the UK population were asked to choose amongst different alternatives for each of the scenarios. The data was analysed and individuals were found to be willing to pay for advanced CCTV cameras with facial recognition technology, X-Ray machines & body scanners and various forms of security personnel. Socio-demographic segments in the sample also became evident.


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This is a Rand Corporation Technical Report. Tom