EDITORIAL: The high cost of homicide

After the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, law enforcement critics said local governments needed to defund the police. Shad White, the state auditor for Mississippi, has released a report that says exactly the opposite.

His report says that the taxpayer cost of each homicide is prohibitively expensive — between $900,000 and $1.2 million, according to statistics from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

These costs include crime scene work and cleanup, medical treatment for the victim, law enforcement investigation, prosecution of the crime and prison time for the defendant.

White’s report says that if the criminal justice statistics are accurate, the 152 homicides in Jackson during 2021 cost governments and taxpayers somewhere between $136 million and $182 million.

The report also cited National Bureau of Economic Research information that says each additional police officer employed can prevent between 0.06 and 0.10 homicides per year. To put it another way, every 10 officers added to a police department have the potential to eliminate one homicide annually.

This is particularly relevant to Mississippi.

“Since 2018, Mississippi has had a higher homicide rate than any other state in the country,” White’s report said. “Jackson, the state capital, had more homicides per capita than any other major metropolitan area in the country last year. Hinds County, home of the state’s capital city, has led the state in reported homicides for all years with available data.”

So it’s not just Jackson. The city gets the most publicity about its homicides because the city’s media outlets rightfully report them in detail. But the entire state leads the nation in the percentage of residents who die as a result of a violent crime.

White’s point is that these fatalities, in addition to the lives cut short and the pain inflicted on the victim’s survivors, come with a sizable financial price. And research indicates that one way to reduce that is to increase the number of police officers.

There’s more to be done, though. The report notes that if Jackson hired 100 more police officers, they would prevent an estimated 6 to 10 homicides per year. That’s not a large number of the city’s 152 deaths last year.

The report said preventing those homicides would save $5.4 million to $12 million in government expenses, and suggests further savings in life and money if those savings are put back into hiring even more officers.

Left unaddressed in the report is how a city or county with a high homicide rate should pay for extra officers. To reduce deaths and save money, they have to make the law enforcement investment up front. That’s a challenge.

Still, this is an interesting report from White. It certainly adds to the belief that, like his auditor predecessors Phil Bryant and Ray Mabus, he has his sights set on higher office.