How SpotCrime Can Save Taxpayers $180 Million
Using a simple discounted cash flow valuation of a police agency contract at $1,800 a year at a 10% discount rate, you'll get a total valuation of the vendor mapping contract at $18,000 (divide 10% into $1,800). Very similar to the amount paid by Benton.
We have seen some agencies pay larger sums for public crime mapping. Most notably, Seattle Police Department spent approximately $350,000 for their public mapping system.
So how do we get to $180 million in savings?
Since we are using back of the envelope numbers, we are going to be very conservative in our estimated costs. We'll use an approximate cost of $10,000 per police agency for public crime mapping.
Why use $10k? It is less than the average cost of a public crime map and allows for the costs of making crime data open to the public. We estimate the cost per agency to be less than $2,000, but to be extra conservative, we are reducing the savings to $10,000 per agency and excluding larger projects like Seattle.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) states that there are 18,000 police agencies in the US.
Multiply the number of agencies by the savings of free public crime mapping, you get $180 million in tax payer savings.
We think this a very true conservative estimate of potential savings to police agencies.
Since we are advocating an open data approach, we are not estimating the potential multiplier effect of opening up this vital data source. As this data becomes fully open to the public, we expect astonishing innovations in how the data is analysed and delivered to the public. At a minimum, we are seeing a 2x reach of crime data when the crime data is made fully public verses using a closed proprietary systems. Not only do closed proprietary "public" crime maps typically cost much more than open data distribution, proprietary crime maps reach less of the public by the fact that they are a single source and a restricted access point.
Please ask your police agency to consider open data instead of a closed proprietary mapping systems.
Save money, increase safety, and encourage innovation. Seems to make sense.
We'll be posting this on Facebook. We welcome your comments there.
Colin Drane
Founder
SpotCrime.com
877.410.1607
Non-conservative estimation of savings here:
The BJS estimates that two thirds of the 18k police agencies are small. Using a less conservative estimate of saving for the small agencies of $15k. You get a $180 m. savings just for the smaller two thirds.
For larger agencies, we'll use and estimate of $40 k (WAG estimation). For the remainder of the 6,000 agencies the savings could be another $240 m.
Giving us a total of $420 million in savings for public crime mapping technology expenditures. Nearly a half a billion!
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