Victim Survey Data, Victim Costs of Crime and the Measurement of Public Safety

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Victim Survey Data, Victim Costs of Crime and the
Measurement of Public Safety

• Roger Bowles, University of York
• Stockholm Criminology Symposium
• June 2006

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Crime and the citizen

• Citizens like to be safe from
• crime, especially against the household
• disorder (Anti Social Behaviour)
• fear of crime
• Absence of crime is a component of the Quality of
  Life
• Presence of crime contributes to Deprivation
• Crime and disorder reduction is a key government
  priority
• A measure of public safety provides an outcome
  measure that might be able to bridge the link
  between
• a consumer satisfaction approach to crime,
• an effectiveness measure for estimating the
  impact of interventions
• a performance measurement criterion for
  criminal justice system agencies
• What measures can be used for this purpose?

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Measures of Crime(1) The Crime Rate

• Conventional measure of crime is
• crime rate number of crimes/population
• Has many advantages, such as
• Well documented
• Widely used
• Easy to understand and compute
• But it also has important weaknesses
• Relies on recorded crime
• Gives equal weight to all kinds of offences
• Has a producer rather than a consumer orientation

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Crime-rate-based Comparisons

• Crime rates can be used to compare safety levels
• League tables increasingly used in the UK,
• league table of cities in England Wales
  (Times, 23.5.06) York came 42nd least dangerous
  out of 55 cities
• Used by Home Office to classify performance
  within CDRP family groups
• Popular in the US see next slide

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US Safest Cities League
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Measures of Crime(2) Victim-based measures of
crime

• Home Office (England Wales) now relies more on
  victim-based measures of crime collected via
  survey instruments (British Crime Survey)
• Strengths
• better reflection of the true extent of crime
• better indication of trends in crime
• includes crimes that are not reported to the
  police.
• Weaknesses
• Limited coverage of crime types
• Surveys are only representative and are very
  costly to conduct at a highly disaggregated level
• Same problems as crime rate when trying to make
  an overall assessment either use equal weights
  or distinguish offence types
• May exclude children, certain kinds of
  institutions

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Victim-based Comparisons

• Victim surveys can be used in much the same way
  as recorded crime rates to make comparisons
  between areas
• Provided that the sample is well-designed and of
  sufficient size, a sample survey can be used to
  estimate the proportion of individuals in an area
  who have been victims of each type of crime
• As an illustration we find the contention that
  Overall crime has fallen by seven per cent
  according to the BCS Crime in England and Wales
  2004/2005, Home Office
• It is possible also to make assertions of the
  kind The risk of becoming a victim of crime has
  fallen from 40 per cent in 1995 to 24 per cent,
  the lowest level recorded since the BCS began in
  1981.
• Surveys typically provide rich data to complement
  the basic victimisation estimates, including data
  on
• Beliefs about whether crime is going up or down
• Fear of crime (how worried people are about
  crime how likely they think it is that they will
  become victims themselves

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Crime, Fear of Crime and the Quality of Life
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Crime and the economist

• Crime and disorder represent negative
  externalities they impose harm and thus costs
• Harm reduction is a good thing, with a positive
  value
• But it is costly to achieve, whether via
• Household precautions (private)
• Collective action (neighbourhood responses)
• Public protection (via prevention activities,
  detecting and prosecuting offenders, imposing
  deterrent or retributive sanctions etc.)
• Regulation (eg requiring alarms to be fitted to
  houses or cars)
• Market-based incentives (eg reduced insurance
  premiums if precautions are taken)
• Economic evaluation of crime reduction
  interventions is based on a balancing of crime
  disorder reduction costs and benefits
• Need an outcome measure that weights offences by
  their costs

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Measures of Crime(3) Risk-based weighted crime
index

• Safety is viewed as the opposite of risk
• If the probability of experiencing an offence is
  p then the probability of remaining safe from it
  is (1-p)
• The economic social costs of different offence
  types are an appropriate weight when aggregating
  Brand Price (2000)

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Desirable Properties of an Index of Public Safety

• Limited to values between 0 and 100 (or 0 and 1)
• 0 represents complete lack of security
• 100 (or 1) represents complete security
• Able to make comparisons across areas within a
  country or (potentially) across countries
• Responds positively to improvements in crime
  rates
• Based on the incidence of offences as experienced
  by households, not as recorded by the police
• The relative costs to victims should drive the
  weight given to different offence types

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Victimisation and the Costs of Crime

• By combining information from victim surveys and
  costs of crime can get close to the impact of
  crime on the citizen
• Focus on offences that impinge directly on the
  household ignore fraud, shoplifting victimless
  crime
• Use relative costs of offences from the
  households perspective as weights
• Use victim survey data to estimate probability of
  being victimised

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York Index of Public Safety

• A household-oriented measure of security, with
  victim focus
• Can be thought of as one component in a wider
  measure of the Quality of Life
• Can be nested in a wider burden of crime
  approach
• A transparent methodology
• Derives weights for offences from the costs to
  households of the different offence types
• Easy to compute
• Easy to present via clickable maps

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Index calculation
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  North Yorkshire Offences recorded 04/05
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Further development

• If the costs of ASB were known then disorder
  could be incorporated alongside various types of
  criminal offence
• Can be used to support international comparisons,
  especially via the use of surveys based on
  commonly agreed methodology, eg ICVS
• It would be possible to incorporate fear of crime
  alongside victimisation if a procedure could be
  found for inferring the relative contributions of
  each to a citizens quality of life

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Performance Monitoring in the CJS

• A variety of Inspectorates, Standards Units,
  Audit Authorities and Government Offices monitor
  and control delivery of services by individual
  CJS agencies
• At local or neighbourhood level there will
  generally be political accountability, and crime
  control may figure prominently in this
• The link between local political accountability
  and agency inspection regimes is where gaps tend
  to be greatest
• Reducing the gap is most easily achieved by
  encouraging agency monitoring to include outcome
  measures like public safety at the expense of
  activity-oriented measures like average days of
  police sick leave

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Public Safety outcomes, environment and resource
inputsthe basic hypotheses

• Public safety (Y)
• (-)
• Deprivation (D) ()
• ()
• Police resources (X)

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Observed input-outcome pairs
Rural, D1
Urban, D2gtD1
Outcome, Y
X1
X2
Police inputs (per cap), X
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Deprivation, funding and police strength
Outcome-egalitarian
Funding formula
Police per capita, X
Actual Police strength
Deprivation, D
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Public safety outcome deprivation London
Manchester
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Measuring Police Efficiency

• Public safety outcome achieved depends on
  deprivation and resource inputs
• Controlling for D and X can identify an expected
  outcome Y
• Efficiency measure can be based on observed Y
  relative to Y
• Might be based on deviation, or deviation squared
  etc.
• Good performance can be rewarded (more spending
  discretion) or penalised (more resources go to
  under-performing forces)

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Bottom-up approaches

• Model thus far have typically been top-down,
  functionally-driven in Williamsons corporate
  sector terminology it is U-form not M-form of
  organisation
• Appropriate for questions such as funding
  formulae and budget allocations
• Less appropriate for inducing a client focus or
  reflecting local preferences about policing
  priorities
• Focus now on service delivery mechanisms and
  accountability
• Need to account for outcomes delivered jointly by
  agencies working in partnerships or teams

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Alternatives

• A radical approach would give local agencies
  (such as Criminal Justice Boards) a central role
  in purchasing services from local agencies
• Contracting with police for delivery of
  specialist functions
• Contracting with agencies (operating alone or in
  consortia) for delivery of local services to
  combat key targets such as volume crime
  (burglary, auto crime) and anti-social behaviour
• Accountability via a measure such as YIPS