SAN FRANCISCO, CA – In a study released this week by the website MoneyGeek, the cost of crime to Manchester came out to over $161 million in 2019.
The economics website calculated each city’s cost of crime and ranked the cities based on the cost of crime per capita, with Manchester coming in at 178th out of a total of 303 American cities with populations studied above 100,000.
In the study, the costs were analyzed through a variety of criteria including medical and mental healthcare needs of victims, damage and loss of property as well as other tangential factors such as depressed home values and higher insurance costs.
Funding for police departments and correctional facilities were also calculated into the study.
The study also looked at violent crime rates, property crime rates and the impact of mass shootings in other parts of the country.
Jesse Bruhn, Annenberg assistant professor of education and economics at Brown University who researches education issues and inner-city gang violence and expert with MoneyGeek, noted that statistics such as these are important, but are only a starting point when it comes to the impact of crime on society.
“Behind all these averages that people like to cite about the crime rates in different communities are individual people and their decisions about how they choose to engage in their community,” said Bruhn. “There’s a lot more heterogeneity in these patterns that we just can’t measure.”
According to the MoneyGeek study, Manchester’s crime cost per capita was $1,431. That figure put it in between Boston ($1,416) and Portland, OR ($1,443). Arlington, VA finished first in the study at $132 while Saint Louis finished last at $9,334.
A full list of cities in the study and its methodology can be seen here.
MoneyGeek also produced a comparable study for towns and cities with populations under 100,000.
Manchester’s closest Granite State comparison in that study came from Concord, with a crime cost per capita of $1,234. Other New Hampshire municipalities in that study included Rochester ($606), Derry ($552), Nashua ($552) and Dover ($177).
That study can be seen here.
