The Balance Between Prosecution and Deterrence
If you could improve performance by 1%, where is the bigger payoff: catching more criminals, or deterring them from committing crimes?
Physical security tactics generally fall into one of two buckets: Prosecution (including identifying and catching criminals) and Deterrence (preventing the crime from happening in the first place).
While it’s good that organizations typically utilize both tactics1, budget allocation between the two often isn’t data-driven. Instead, these investments tend to be a reaction to noise — funnelling resources where the most visible activity is happening.
This calculator is designed to help you cut through that noise. It calculates the marginal utility of each tactic for your organization, specifically the financial benefit of a 1% Improvement in Prosecution versus a 1% Improvement in Deterrence.
Inputs
These metrics can vary widely based on the industry, region, and type of crime. There can also be significant outliers that affect the average. Edit the inputs to best reflect your current situation.
Can be calculated by dividing all incident costs (direct and indirect) by the number of incidents in that year.
Provide an estimate based on the types of criminals your organization would investigate (e.g. many organizations would not investigate a first time offense).
The percentage of the value of stolen or damaged goods that are recovered when the offender is caught, if any. The recovery rate for stolen property (excluding vehicles) averages 10–15% per FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data.
Prosecution Funnel
The stages required to successfully catch and prosecute criminals.
The percentage of incidents where the property owner can identify the individual responsible. Impacted by camera placement, lighting conditions, visibility of identifiable characteristics, existence of suspect in the system, and other factors. 15% assumption based on practitioner interviews and experience.
The percentage of positive IDs that result in a formal case opened by law enforcement. Impacted by loss value, availability of police resources, and prior record of the suspect. 15% assumption based on practitioner interviews and experience.
The percentage of arrests that result in a conviction. The path to conviction can be broken when prosecutors decline charges, evidence is deemed insufficient, or cases 'age out' due to court backlogs. Analysis using the Paper Prisons Racial Justice Act Tool shows an average 23.6% arrest-to-conviction conversion rate from 2010–2021.
Calculated Benefits
1% Improvement to Prosecution
Prosecution is successful when an organization gets a positive ID on a suspect, their case is accepted by law enforcement, law enforcement arrests the culprit, and the culprit is convicted. In practice, organizations typically only pursue costly repeat offenders.
Additional Criminals Convicted
2.7
Additional Crimes Prevented
318.6
Additional Recovered Value
$1,125
Estimated 1-Year Benefit
$1,125
1% Improvement to Deterrence
Deterrence is successful when the perceived cost of acting exceeds the perceived benefits. This is influenced by the type of crime (premeditated vs. opportunistic), time of day, historical police response, target hardness, environmental cues, prior offender experience, and more. Real-world deterrence deployments (visible infrastructure, two-way voice-down, rapid response, etc.) have shown sustained reductions in incidents from 40% to 100%2.
Crimes Never Attempted
1,000
Estimated 1-Year Benefit
$1,000,000
In this scenario, a 1% improvement to deterrence yields a
212.8%
more benefit than an equivalent improvement in prosecution.
1. In practice, few approaches are pure deterrence or pure forensics. However, this simplification is a useful exercise to improve decision-making.
2. To remain effective, deterrence must be dynamic. Static solutions eventually suffer from decay as criminals learn to outsmart them.