It appears that police month
is continuing here on Northern Economist as I came across police spending data
from the latest BMA Municipal Report -
the 2022 edition. The BMA reports
provides estimates of net policing costs per capita both excluding and including
capital cost amortization as well as per $100,000 dollars of assessment. These costs vary quite a bit and the BMA
report has a preamble to the police cost data explaining that such costs can vary a great
deal depending on the daily inflow and outflow of non-residents and commuters,
the policing of specialized facilities in a municipality such as casinos or
airports as well as demographic characteristics, the urban rural mix, service
levels and the complexity of crimes.
Having noted all that, Figure
1 provides a chart ranking policing costs per capita for Ontario’s thirty
largest municipalities and they range from a high of $461 per capita for
Thunder Bay to a low of 258 dollars per capita for Milton, Burlington and
Oakville, which of course all share the costs via the Halton Regional Police
Service. Indeed, a number of these other communities have the same per capita
net costs because they are part of a regional service – Durham Region (Clarington, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Pickering), York Region
(Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Markham, Waterloo Region (Kitchener, Waterloo,
Cambridge), Niagara Region (St. Catharines, Niagara Falls).
In trying to find out what might
account for these differences, the simplest starting point is a plot of net per
capita costs against the number of officers per 100,000 population as provided in
Figure 2. It is a positive relationship
with each additional officer per 100,000 resulting in an addition of nearly 2
dollars per capita in policing costs. These are policing costs and are not simply the cost of an officer but
include all the costs and support associated with that officer. As you will recall in an earlier post, police
forces also have a fairly large number of civilian employees as support. However, simply stating that having more
officers is going to cost more money is not terribly helpful in trying to
explain differences across municipalities.
Figure 3 plots the net costs per
capita against the area of the municipality in square kilometers. For most of these police forces, as area rises, the
per capita cost actually falls though it starts to rise for very large
municipal areas. The plot vaguely resembles a u-shaped cost
curve but it is ultimately not very satisfying chart because there is not really much
in the middle to support the fitted curve.
The three communities on the far right who make up the upward sloping
part of the curve are Hamilton, Ottawa and Greater Sudbury.
Figure 4 looks at the relationship
between policing costs per capita and the community crime severity (Using the
2021 Crime Severity Index from Statistics Canada). Once the polynomial curve is fitted to these
points, one can say with a certain degree of confidence that there is an
positive relationship between crime severity and police costs per capita but it
is somewhat non-linear with one peak at a crime index of 50 and another at
about 90. Why this relationship might be
bi-modal is either statistical luck of the draw with this data set or the
subject of future research.
Finally, Figure 5 plots police costs
per capita against total population to see if there are any economy of scale
type relationship that might emerge.
The u-shaped curve that emerges is misleading because only Toronto is responsible for
pulling up that curve, For the rest of
the communities, as population rises, per capita policing costs come down. In a sense, throwing Toronto into the mix is
not useful because it is so much larger than any other municipality in
Ontario.
I guess, the ultimate insight would
be to run a regression with some of these variables as determinants of per
capita policing costs. Table 1 below
presents the results of a very simple regression of net police costs per capita
on municipal area (square kilometers), total population, Crime Severity Index in
2021 and regional fixed effects variables with the GTA/Central as the omitted
comparison category. Policing costs per
capita do appear to be significant and positively related at the 5 percent
level with Crime Severity and being in northern Ontario. Population also seems to be a positive driver
but again that is likely being driven by Toronto. Still, it could be that really large
populations create much more complex crime environments that really drive up
police costs per capita.
So, in the end, what drives police
costs in Ontario? Crime Severity is likely a factor but regional differences as
captured by regional dummy variables also seems to be of some importance. Obviously, more research is needed on this
topic but that is time intensive and assumes that someone actually wants an answer.
