Police Costs of the Drug Market Intervention

Despite a growing literature examining the costs and benefits of increasing the number of police officers in a jurisdiction, the costs associated with specific tactics and approaches police departments can use to reduce crime in their jurisdictions remain largely unknown. This article contributes to this literature by generating policing cost estimates associated with implementing the Drug Market Intervention (DMI) in two cities. Using an ex post micro-cost analysis, we estimated the costs for police resources used though the DMI 'call-in' ranged from $91,477 to $142,280 in one city, and from $104,878 to $155,668 in the other (in 2011 dollars). Although we do not know the value of the resources that would have been spent without DMI, our analyses provide police departments and others with cost estimates, information about the order of magnitude of the efforts involved, and how the cost estimates might vary from the base analysis under a variety of alternative scenarios.