A new study from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform finds that every gun homicide in San Bernardino costs taxpayers 2.3 million dollars.
David Muhammad, executive director of the NICJR, says that while the human toll of gun violence is the costliest, each gun homicide also has a significant financial burden on the taxpayers of the city of San Bernardino.
“So we looked at the response to shooting scenes with police and ambulance and fire, EMT, investigators' response at the scenes, also the hospitalization and incarceration and a trial, victim compensation, all of these various aspects of costs that we examined and determined that a low-level, safe estimate is that every homicide, every gun homicide costs the city of San Bernardino approximately $2.3 million and every injury shooting $900,000,” Muhammad says.
According to Muhammad, those numbers are a low estimate - they don't take into consideration "real" costs.
"We deliberately took the low end of many of those costs to have safe, defensible number, and we also did not include real costs like indirect costs of loss of productivity of the perpetrator, or the victim working, or the reduction in property value when there's a shooting in a particular neighborhood that corresponds with lost tax revenue."
"We did not take those kinds of costs into consideration, that some national studies say would bring every individual shooting up to somewhere near $10 million. But we just really examined the true, direct cost and determined that every homicide costs the city $2.3 million," Muhammad says.
You can read the full report here.