The Issue of Safety and Security is an Economic Policy Issue

Sorry about my absence on the blogsphere recently. I'm currently swamped with work. I did manage to write this piece last Friday and I am hoping it is published in the Badger Herald. This weekend I will be writing an article advocating open borders for the US.

Last week, the Student Service Finance Committee had to make a hard decision on whether the SAFEwalk service was overall beneficial to campus given its steep costs per walker. The service maintains that the two central components of transportation and safety. With regards to the transportation service, SAFEwalk does not perform well in terms of serving a large percentage of the student body where the SAFEride and SAFEbus have shown to be much more widely used. No one on the committee was vouching for the service to be saved on efficiency or transportation use grounds.
The main premise then in opposition to cutting the SAFEwalk program was the component of safety. Without clear evidence and statistics to backup the claim of SAFE officials, employees, and supporters that SAFE is making the campus more safe, it is hard for me as a committee member to assert these claims as being fully valid. That being said, the main argument to support the SAFEwalk service on the basis of safety then is that safety is priceless and if we could only save one woman from being assaulted or raped, it would be worth it. This illogical assertion needs to be addressed because in full in order to be able to make wise policy decisions.
Within the realm of economics, there are a number of tools used to justify or make public policy decisions. Two specific tools are particularly pertinent when evaluating a safety or security decision. The first is the precautionary principle, a tool often used in environmental economics when determining what level of a specific pollutant is deemed to be both safety conscious and economically viable being based partially on science and partially on opinion. According to definition, it is supposed to be used when there is a “reasonable suspicion of harm, lack of scientific certainty or consensus must not be used to postpone preventative action”. In applying it to SAFEwalk, what is the adequate level of safety and crime for how many walkers are needed in a specific area to be the “eyes and ears” of campus and prevent crime in a given area. Government or SAFE itself would then make the decision based on the crime level that keeps people and property relatively safe. Even by setting a precautionary principle in place, crime will still occur and low-level pollutants will hurt particular people and the particular level and therefore costs and benefits should be calculated and used in the analysis even if costs and benefits are not the main criteria. The precautionary principle is designed however then to lower the likelihood of harm to the public.
The second tool is cost-benefit analysis which weights the cost and the benefits of an action while accounting for time through discounting. Cost-benefit analysis is particularly popular in the financial world but it is also used when making individual purchasing decision, environmental policy decisions, and is applicable in many decisions a particular individual makes. Applying the tool to security, one would need to weight out the costs of patrol officers or security officials with the overhead of the program and then designate the benefits of prevention. The costs are easy to evaluate. The benefits are not. In order to define the distinct benefits of SAFE, we would need to evaluate the benefits a SAFE employee stopping people from damaging property (possibly $200 for a street sign) or the benefits of ending an assault which clearly is very difficult (maybe $500,000, $1,000,000 or any particular number that the department or government chooses to value it). The fact is that if you do not put a value on stopping even an abhorrent act like rape, then you cannot evaluate the opportunity costs of the decision. For instance, if we put all of society’s taxes and stock into stopping rape/assault with security and technology, then we will have no money in this hypothetical “police state” of ours to regulate environmental quality, provide social services, carry out government, fund national defense, and do all the other things that make society run.
The argument I am merely trying to make is that in public policy, officials cannot try to view certain aspects of people’s lives or even an individual’s life itself as “priceless”. With any policy, government needs to put a price on the cost and benefits of the service being provided whether it be police protection, transportation infrastructure, or pollution controls. Right now actuaries have already determined what your life is worth in the case you want to buy life insurance. Homeland Security officials quite possibly could be taking this actuarial data into account when determining where to place specific security measures. The quality of your health might be being evaluated at this current moment by the Environmental Protection Agency Staff when deciding air quality laws and the fact there are coal power plants on or near your place of residence. If we cannot put even place high numbers of dollars on safety, government and public officials have no way of evaluating many important policy decisions. As a committee member of SSFC, one of the main points I had to consider is whether SAFEwalk as a safety service is worth over forty dollars per walk (to the students). I had to evaluate whether this money could be better used elsewhere in the name of transportation and safety and also had to determine whether SAFE indeed does make the campus a safer place. The committee made the decision and I stand by it.