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Million dollar blocks
An innovative analysis by Eric Cadora highlights "million-dollar blocks" -- individual city blocks where more than one million dollars per block per year are spent to incarcerate individuals from that block. Some blocks cost over five million dollars per year...A million dollars, coincidentally, is roughly what it would cost to pay for one patrol officer, twenty-four hours a day, every day for one year.
That is from Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood: My Year Spent Policing Baltimore's Eastern District. In Brooklyn of 2003, there were 35 million dollar blocks. Here is more information, plus maps and graphs.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 21, 2008 at 07:17 AM in Law | Permalink
Comments
"A million dollars, coincidentally, is roughly what it would cost to pay for one patrol officer, twenty-four hours a day, every day for one year."
A patrol officer costs $114/hour?
Posted by: Anthony at Apr 21, 2008 7:44:47 AM
When you include training, equipment, support, and benefits, it well might cost that much. I don't know what fraction of police expenditures are salary, but it's nowhere near a majority in most firms.
Posted by: Grant Gould at Apr 21, 2008 7:59:01 AM
Incidentally, there's a fairly excellent interview with Moskos here.
Posted by: Grant Gould at Apr 21, 2008 8:02:03 AM
My million-dollar figure is a very rough estimate, but Grant is basically right. Salary is just part of the expense of a police officer. Benefits, equipment, training, overhead. They all add up.
You need approximately 6 police officer to have one police officer on duty all of the time. And you need approximately 2 police officers to have 1 officer assigned to patrol (though there's no real reason you couldn't simply expand the patrol division rather than keep the current ratio of 1/2 of police assigned to patrol). But as it stands now, you would need to hire 12 officer to get one officer on patrol 24/7. I figure $1,000,000 is a good rough figure.
Posted by: Peter Moskos at Apr 21, 2008 8:12:47 AM
One cop on the street 24/7 comes out to about 4.2 FTE's, not counting vacations, holidays, sick time, etc. So let's round up by a generous 0.8 FTE for that coverage (about 40 weeks/year) to 5.0 FTE's, just to make the numbers nice. Now let's double that - 10 FTE's. That comes out to $100,000 per cop, which is a lot more than most of the cops I know make.
Posted by: Ned at Apr 21, 2008 8:28:22 AM
Note that he said "pay for", not "pay".
Posted by: perianwyr at Apr 21, 2008 9:03:41 AM
In the engineering world, the broad-brush first-pass estimate for total personnel-related operating costs is salary times two.
Posted by: bartman at Apr 21, 2008 9:27:41 AM
Ned and Pete seem to be agreeing with each other; the difference between 5 and 6 FTEs is minimal for a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Note also that having staff on-hand to take police reports, and the time that it takes for a cop to process somebody in the system (when they aren't patrolling) means that you need redundant coverage. If anything, 6 FTEs is low.
As for pay; Oakland cops start at just under $70,000, according to an ad a couple of years old. I spoke to a cop at LAX that averaged 60+ hours a week, and took home over $100K; that isn't including benefits. These totals will vary by locality, of course.
Posted by: EnlightenedDuck at Apr 21, 2008 9:29:19 AM
Brownsville and East New York are still pretty rough. These days some parts of Bed-Stuy are better known for Brownstones costing almost a million.
Posted by: bkguy at Apr 21, 2008 9:33:00 AM
Ah....but the state pays for the incarceration, while the local municipality or county pays for the cop.
Posted by: S.C. Public Defender at Apr 21, 2008 9:35:27 AM
I took a look at Cadora's maps. Some of the "blocks" with the highest incarceration costs were actually housing projects, or complexes of high rises, meaning that they had significantly higher populations than a typical city block. I think it would take more than one patrol officer to effectively police a housing project of 20 or 30 high-rises, so the author's calculus is a little bit disingenuous.
Posted by: Bartman at Apr 21, 2008 9:45:45 AM
for comparison, how much does it cost to provide 24/7 prison guard coverage for N prisoners? or teachers for a block's worth of children?
Posted by: DK at Apr 21, 2008 11:10:17 AM
"million-dollar blocks" -- individual city blocks where more than one million dollars per block "per year" are spent to incarcerate individuals from that block.
"In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks that fit this category -- ones where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million."
According to the article, "million dollar blocks" refer to areas where the "total" cost of residents' imprisonment calculated for the entire length of their stay exceeds one million dollars. In your header, you state one million per block per year. Judging from the author's example that one block containing fiver prisoners (@30,000 per prisoner per year) is a million dollar block, I think your header might be a lit bit misleading
Posted by: at Apr 21, 2008 11:20:37 AM
Odd way to look at things. "Individuals from the block" could have committed crimes other places, right? So having a cop outside their houses 24/7 likely wouldn't do much to prevent the crimes. You'd need someone following the residents, not camping out at their houses.
Posted by: paa at Apr 21, 2008 12:04:42 PM
It seems that a complementary good to mr. Mosko's book is "The Wire" - a TV series set in Baltmore and in one instance making the exact same point about patrols.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(TV_series)
Posted by: Jüri Saar at Apr 21, 2008 1:55:19 PM
__, I think you're missing something. Yes, it computes the lifetime cost of imprisonment, but not for all incarcerated inmates who used to live on that block--only the ones incarcerated in a given year. So this is a leading indicator, but the concept is basically right: one million dollars of added liability per year.
Posted by: Ryan Miller at Apr 21, 2008 2:25:41 PM
I'm willing to buy the estimate of $1 million for a 24 hour patrol.
I am also willing to buy that such a patrol would be a superior investment to incarceration.
What I am not willing to buy is the implication that providing such a patrol would cut incarceration from the block to zero.
Posted by: JohnMcG at Apr 21, 2008 4:22:01 PM
If we want to accurately count these communities and give them their fair share of political power in the legislatures, then the population of these communities needs to be counted in those communities.
Well, if those districts are contributing so many more criminals than others, I am not sure we want to give them their fair share of political power in the legisatures.
Posted by: Loki on the run at Apr 21, 2008 4:32:47 PM
If you add more cops, you get more arrests and incarcerations.
Good point on the state paying versus the locals paying. Maybe the cops should have to pay for the incarcerations.
Posted by: Andrew at Apr 21, 2008 6:25:36 PM
One million bucks will buy approximately 2000 handguns or 10,000 deadbolts or some number of dogs. Maybe we should just give the people on the block the million bucks, then they can pay off the cops to stop arresting them for drugs.
Posted by: Andrew at Apr 21, 2008 6:30:10 PM
"My million-dollar figure is a very rough estimate, but Grant is basically right. Salary is just part of the expense of a police officer. Benefits, equipment, training, overhead. They all add up."
I was skeptical so I decided to look up the cost (per hour) for a private armed bodyguard. That should factor in all those costs. Looks like it runs about $75-125/hour, so I guess your figure could be seen as reasonable in that sense.
On the other hand, I happen to have done some accounting work for a homeowners association which hires off-duty state police officers to patrol their neighborhood and give tickets to traffic violators, and they pay a lot less. IIRC, they pay about $25/hour, and gave them 1099s at the end of the year. I'll have to look it up...
Ah, here's Tampa's Extra Duty Program. "The Tampa Police Department provides a supplementary service to the public by allowing uniformed officers to engage in extra duty police work. This may include police officers assigned to special events, traffic control at constructions sites, or special escorts." $32/hour base rate per officer. $38/hour for "holiday/special event". Includes workers comp and administrative fee. $10 vehicle/equipment fee. I bet you could hire out an officer 24/7 to patrol your block for under half a million a year. But maybe the City of Tampa is losing money on this deal.
Posted by: Anthony at Apr 21, 2008 7:05:31 PM
$10 vehicle/equipment fee is per shift. I believe the average shift is 3 or 4 hours, so let's say $4/hour vehicle/equipment fee.
I think the big problem is officers would probably want to work in pairs to go into those "million dollar blocks". So I'll agree that a million dollars is roughly what it'd cost to pay for two patrol officers, twenty-four hours a day, every day for one year.
Of course, I agree especially with JohnMcG (and Andrew) that this exercise in determining the cost to patrol a block 24/7 isn't particularly related to the story. One (or two) cops patrolling a block won't cut the crime to zero, and might very well *increase* the number of arrests and incarcerations. And paa also raises a good point that the crimes aren't necessarily occurring on the block in the first place.
Posted by: Anthony at Apr 21, 2008 7:40:13 PM
What’s an “FTE”?
Bartman (and others) is right. I’m kind of assuming a $50,000 base pay and another $50,000 per officer for other expenses.
bkguy, I think you have a very good point. The money comes from different agencies. So what saves money for one may not save money for another. But as taxpayers, we should be able to see the big picture and demand better bang for the buck.
S.C. Public Defender, you’re very right. Perhaps the projects do distort the concept of “block.”
DK, I see your point: the cost isn’t for year, but as estimate of the total cost. Like Jüri Saar says, remember, this is just for people sentences in one year. So next year, it may be the same.
Loki on the run, I think you’re really on to something. If police departments were given the budget for prisons, I think that would lead to good things (and less imprisonment and more pay for cops).
Andrew, thanks for looking those things up. Keep us informed....
Posted by: Peter Moskos at Apr 21, 2008 9:11:45 PM
An FTE is "Full-Time Employment."
Posted by: Trey at Apr 22, 2008 11:00:09 AM
(or Employee...)
Posted by: Trey at Apr 22, 2008 11:01:04 AM
