Crime Prevention Helps Save Municipal Budgets

Municipalities continue to feel the increasingly challenged budget crunch. Several leading public safety authorities who share crime prevention tips recommend an effective way to address this revenue problem. They advocate implementation of proactive crime prevention strategies. By preventing nuisance crimes such as graffiti, vandalism, illegal dumping and metal theft reduces the public revenue burden. It’s a considerable savings to avoid expensive graffiti removal, toxic waste cleanup costs and nuisance crimes adjudication.

Even in areas where such criminal behavior has not occurred in the past, it is unfortunately beginning to pop up more. The FBI posted property crime statistics from 2013: “Nationally, a property crime occurred every 3.7 seconds; one burglary every 16.4 second; one larceny theft every 5.3 seconds; one motor vehicle theft every 45.1 seconds.” These offenses touch real people’s lives, and affect the public’s trust and treasury, too.

Proactive crime prevention programs and tools are an investment that saves the city budget and allocates funds to other areas of need. In many cases this is easily over hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars that could be spent on training, infrastructure, repairs, or other purposes to enhance the community.

Benjamin Franklin’s adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is just as applicable today as it was in his day.  Take action if you are looking for crime prevention programs that work and experience the difference in increasing public safety. Save costly expenditures of time, money and resources, and watch public confidence grow.  You’ll be glad you did.