The economic cost of homicide

HOMICIDE–‘injuries inflicted by another person with intent to injure or kill, by any means’ (WHO, n.d.)–places a heavy economic burden on societies that experience this form of violence. Family and friends suffer when a loved one is killed, but their community and society also pay the price. The impact of homicide is physical, social and psychological, and also economic, and its costs are both direct and indirect. As one journalist put it, ‘[t]he tab for taxpayers and society starts running as soon as a bullet strikes someone, from detectives on the street and trauma surgeons at the city's public hospital to months of rehab for victims and years of court proceedings for the accused’ (Jones and McCormick, 2013). This chapter calculates the direct costs of homicide by estimating the economic loss to society.

Attempts by policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars to establish evidence of the diverse impacts of violence in general, and of homicide in particular, cover a wide range of issues, such as loss of life and health (victims and victimization), the undermining of trust in institutions and security providers (perceptions and attitudes towards the justice system and its institutions), and the direct costs generated by different forms of violence. All of these form part of the social cost of homicide. Estimates of the direct costs of homicide represent the potential material benefits to the wider society of reducing this form of violence.

This chapter focuses on the economic loss to society of homicide and the benefits of reducing it, using two key concepts: ‘excess homicide’ and average life expectancy. The first refers to an ideal situation in which violence is rare and people can expect to live without the fear of meeting a violent death. Excess homicide is the difference between a ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ level of homicide (see Box 5.1) and the incidence of homicide observed in reality. By comparing average life expectancy in 105 countries for which age and sex-disaggregated data is available, with the life expectancy these countries would have had in the absence of excess homicide, it is possible to estimate how many more months on average people would have lived in a context of a ‘normal’ level of homicide.