6 Suggestions for future work
Owing to limitations in the availability and consistency of data, we have not been able to include estimates for every part of the costs of crime ‘matrix’, although we have sought to capture most of the significant costs. This means the results from our work are at best indicative. Areas where estimates are missing and, for completeness, could be added are:
- health and lost output costs associated with drug offences;
- health and lost output costs associated with ‘all other’ offences;
- costs for public sector agencies that have not yet been included, notably: the Ministry of Education (preventing damage to schools); the NZ Defence Force (sea patrols to deter illegal fishing, seconding army personnel to help with murder investigations); the NZ Fire Service (responding to deliberately-lit fires); ACC (preventing/responding to fraud); Internal Affairs (e.g. preventing and detecting illegal pornography); and MED (preventing and detecting insider trading);
- costs incurred by not-for-profit groups that deal with the consequences of crime (e.g. Rape Crisis and Women’s Refuge).
Ideally, in the future, more robust costs of crime estimates for New Zealand would be compiled and updated on a regular basis, in particular drawing on New Zealand data where available and incorporating developments in international thinking. We note that the Ministry of Justice has recently begun a number of relevant pieces of work, including: an estimate of the costs of households and firms in anticipation of, and in response to, crime (with NZIER); three two-yearly victim of crime surveys, with the first planned for 2006; and a justice sector ‘pipeline’ model. These studies would be valuable in informing future analyses of New Zealand’s costs of crime.
