Now police can have a common currency as well, one that quantifies the true cost of all crime – the harm it causes.
- Lawrence Sherman
A “menu of harm” that measures crime according to the price of damage inflicted on victims – rather than counting crimes as if they are all of equal seriousness – needs to be adopted worldwide to focus police resources on the worst criminal acts, say leading University of Cambridge criminologists.
They describe the UK’s current approach to crime metrics as a “paper-and-pencil legacy of the 19th century”, presenting crime in ‘grand totals’ that give equal weight to shoplifting and homicide, for example – an approach used to leverage ‘crime is down’ media reports, causing police to focus on minor yet high-volume offences that cause less harm than rarer but more serious crimes.
The team, including Cambridge Institute of Criminology Director Professor Lawrence Sherman and his colleague Peter Neyroud, a former Chief Constable, are calling for a “meaningful measure of crime” grounded in the true societal cost: the harm done to its citizens.
Sherman, Neyroud and colleagues have devised the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CHI), which they describe as essentially a crime version of the cost-of-living index – a classification system weighted by, in this case, the likely impact of an offence on victims. The first detailed outline of the Cambridge CHI is published in the academic journal Policing.
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Image: police
Credit: Evan Wood
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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