When elected officials discuss public safety, the conversation too often begins and ends with the cost of the public safety budget. How many police officers can we afford? How many firefighters? How many EMS personnel? How many dispatchers? How much will the next fire station, police vehicle, ambulance, or communications system cost?
Those are legitimate questions. Taxpayers have every right to expect their elected officials to be responsible stewards of public money.
But two, additional questions deserve considerably more attention:
First: What Is Your Community Worth?
Suppose you had to sell your entire jurisdiction on the open market tomorrow. I don’t mean selling a house here or a business there. I mean putting the entire jurisdiction up for sale. Take all of the publicly owned assets, including the streets, sidewalks, water and sewer systems, public buildings, parks, libraries, and everything else the community owns, and put them in one bag. Then take everything privately owned, including homes, businesses, commercial buildings, industrial property, and all of the other private assets within the jurisdiction, and put those in another bag. What would the community be worth if you added it all together?
I have done this exercise numerous times over the past few years because I think it forces elected officials and public-safety leaders to look at their communities differently. Instead of asking only, “How much are we spending on public safety?” the question becomes, “What are we investing that money to protect?”
The last time I went through this exercise, I was trying to convince a reluctant mayor and city council to support construction of a new police department facility. We had talked about the condition of the existing facility, the operational requirements of the department, and what a new facility would provide, but the discussion kept coming back to the cost. That is understandable. Fifteen million dollars is a lot of money, particularly when you are looking at it as a single line item in a municipal budget.
During the meeting, however, the mayor said something that changed the way the discussion was framed. He said, in effect, “After talking to this guy (pointing at me), I had to ask myself a question: What is the value of our city?”
We had done the work to answer that question. When the publicly owned assets and privately owned assets were considered together, we determined that the approximate value of the community was somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 billion.
That changed the conversation.
The question was no longer simply whether the city could afford to spend $15 million on a new police facility. The question became whether it made sense to invest $15 million in the infrastructure needed to protect approximately $12 billion in public and private assets.
The mayor’s answer was straightforward: “You betcha. We’re going to get a new police department.”
I have never forgotten that conversation because it demonstrated exactly what I mean when I say that public-safety leaders have to educate their constituents about the value they provide. The police department was not asking the city to spend $15 million simply because police officers wanted a nicer building. The department was asking the community to invest in the infrastructure necessary to protect a community whose combined public and private assets were worth approximately $12 billion.
That is a very different conversation.
And I think every police chief, fire chief, EMS director, 911 director, and other public-safety executive should be asking a similar question about their own jurisdiction: What is the value of the community we have been entrusted to protect?
Once you begin looking at the community that way, public safety starts to look considerably less like an expense and considerably more like an investment in protecting the community’s economic foundation.
Second: What does properly staffed, properly equipped, and properly managed public safety contribute to the economic health of the community?
That question changes the conversation.
Public safety is not simply another expense on a municipal ledger. Police, fire, EMS, 911, traffic enforcement, code enforcement, emergency management, and related services help protect the homes, businesses, infrastructure, investments, and economic activity upon which a community’s tax base depends.
The benefit isn’t always visible on a government financial statement. In fact, some of the most important benefits occur because something doesn’t happen.
A crash doesn’t happen. A burglary doesn’t happen. A fire doesn’t destroy an entire building. A hazardous-material incident doesn’t become an environmental disaster. A business doesn’t close because of repeated vandalism. A neighborhood doesn’t deteriorate because nuisance properties are allowed to become permanent fixtures.
Prevention is difficult to photograph because the photograph is of something that never happened.
Nevertheless, the economic value can be very real.
Bear with me as I describe a few specific ways that Public Safety adds value:
1. Traffic enforcement protects more than traffic safety
Consider traffic enforcement. Isn’t it true that the mission of “traffic enforcement” is to contribute to people and goods getting across the jurisdiction in the safest, least expensive manner?
Effective traffic enforcement can reduce crashes, injuries, deaths, and property damage. When crashes become less frequent or less severe, there are fewer claims against automobile insurers and fewer costs associated with repairing vehicles, treating injuries, and replacing damaged property.
That doesn’t mean every traffic citation produces a measurable reduction in someone’s insurance premium. The relationship is much broader than that. The point is that taxpayer-funded traffic enforcement can reduce the frequency and severity of costly events that ultimately have to be paid for by residents, businesses, insurers and other parts of the economy.
Every preventable collision potentially involves vehicle repairs, towing, rental vehicles, medical treatment, lost wages, insurance deductibles, and business interruption. Those costs have to be absorbed somewhere, even when the government never receives a bill for them.
DUI enforcement provides an even clearer example. A DUI crash can produce vehicle damage, hospitalization, rehabilitation, permanent disability, lost earnings, workers’ compensation claims, legal expenses, and, in the worst circumstances, the loss of a person’s life.
This is one of the clearest examples of prevention having economic value.
Speed enforcement is related, because the issue isn’t simply whether someone is traveling above a posted speed limit. Properly targeted enforcement can reduce the likelihood that a collision becomes a catastrophic event. As crash severity increases with speed, reducing dangerous driving behavior can potentially reduce the enormous economic consequences associated with the most serious collisions.
Commercial vehicle enforcement provides another less obvious economic benefit. Weight and safety requirements exist partly to protect the traveling public, but they also protect public investment in roads, bridges, pavement, intersections, and drainage infrastructure. An overloaded or unsafe commercial vehicle can contribute to damage that eventually has to be repaired with taxpayer dollars.
Parking enforcement can have an economic dimension as well. When commercial districts have blocked loading zones, inaccessible businesses, blocked fire lanes, congestion, and poorly managed parking turnover, businesses can lose time and customers. Proper enforcement helps keep the physical environment functioning so that commerce can function within it.
2. Code enforcement protects private investment
Code enforcement is another area that is often treated as a nuisance rather than as economic infrastructure.
Abandoned vehicles, deteriorating buildings, illegal dumping, unsafe structures, excessive weeds, illegal businesses, and other visible violations can affect how residents, customers, and investors perceive an area. Research has examined the relationship between property conditions, code enforcement, and crime, while other research has found associations between crime and property values.
The larger point is straightforward:
Code enforcement can help protect the collective value of a community’s private property.
Imagine a property owner considering a $100,000 renovation. That owner is making a judgment about the future of the neighborhood as well as the future of the individual property. The willingness to make that investment can be affected by what surrounds the property.
If I maintain my property, but the property next door becomes an abandoned building, the lot across the street becomes an illegal dumping ground, and another neighboring property becomes a chronic nuisance, I have less reason to believe my investment will retain its value.
Consistent enforcement can establish a different expectation: If I maintain my property, my neighbors will be expected to maintain theirs.
That expectation has economic value.
The same principle applies to commercial investment. Businesses generally have little interest in locating or expanding in areas surrounded by vacant buildings, illegal dumping, chronic nuisance properties, unsafe structures, abandoned vehicles and unmanaged properties. Effective enforcement can help create an environment in which private investment becomes more attractive.
Nuisance-property enforcement can also reinforce policing. Poorly maintained and abandoned properties can create opportunities for criminal activity. Addressing those properties can remove opportunities for crime while improving the surrounding physical environment.
Code enforcement and policing, therefore, should not necessarily be viewed as completely separate economic functions. They can reinforce one another.
3. Police protection helps protect the value of property
The same economic connection exists with police patrol and crime prevention.
Crime affects the desirability of neighborhoods, and property markets can reflect those conditions. A review of the economics of policing published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives notes that crime reduction creates benefits associated with reduced victimization, while also emphasizing that the economic effects of policing are complex and that the distribution of benefits and costs matters.
For a homeowner, the issue isn’t merely whether the police department made an arrest. It is whether the community remains a place where people want to live, raise families, and invest their money.
For a business owner, it is whether customers feel comfortable coming through the door, whether employees feel comfortable coming to work, and whether the owner believes the location will remain viable.
The economic chain can therefore be understood as:
Public safety → lower crime and disorder → greater neighborhood desirability → protection of property values → protection of residents’ wealth.
Police presence also contributes to the environment businesses consider when deciding where to locate. Retailers, restaurants, professional services, manufacturers, offices, and developers all have reasons to consider crime, emergency response and general public order when evaluating an investment.
The same principle applies to theft.
A burglary, shoplifting incident, theft, or act of vandalism isn’t simply a police report. For a business, the actual economic loss can include stolen merchandise, damaged property, security improvements, insurance deductibles, lost business, employee time and administrative costs.
Preventing the event preserves all of those resources.
Investigative work can also recover assets obtained through fraud, embezzlement, identity theft, organized theft and other financial crimes. When money or property is recovered, the economic value is quite tangible.
Organized retail crime is another example, particularly for larger retailers. Protecting inventory can protect sales, employment, business investment, insurance exposure, and sales-tax revenue.
Burglary prevention has a similar effect. Preventing residential and commercial burglaries can reduce property losses, insurance claims, property damage, and security replacement costs.
And vandalism is not free simply because it doesn’t involve a sophisticated criminal enterprise. A vandalized storefront, vehicle, school, apartment complex, or business represents destruction of privately owned capital.
Every act of vandalism prevented preserves somebody’s investment.
4. Fire protection is economic protection
The economic contribution of the fire service may be among the easiest to demonstrate.
The U.S. Fire Administration specifically recognizes that subtracting fire loss from the pre-incident value of property can demonstrate how much property was saved through fire department intervention.
That gives elected officials a useful way of looking at a fire response.
Suppose a fire department arrives at a $2 million commercial building and prevents a total loss. If $400,000 of damage occurs, the department did not merely “put out a fire.”
It helped preserve approximately $1.6 million of property.
That is economic infrastructure.
Fire prevention inspections, fire codes, public education, and enforcement work before the fire ever occurs. Fire suppression protects property after a fire begins. Together, those functions reduce the probability and severity of catastrophic loss.
NIST research on fire economics explicitly examines prevention and protection in terms of societal benefits and reducing property damage. NIST research has also identified reduced insurance premiums and reduced uninsured direct and indirect losses among the economic benefits associated with fire protection measures.
And a fire doesn’t simply threaten a building.
It threatens business continuity.
A fire can interrupt payroll, eliminate jobs, destroy inventory, disrupt customer relationships, affect suppliers, eliminate tax revenue, terminate leases, and damage a company’s reputation. Preventing the fire or limiting its spread can preserve all of those economic relationships.
Fire codes and inspections are therefore more than regulatory requirements. They are risk-management mechanisms intended to reduce the likelihood and consequences of catastrophic loss.
5. EMS protects the community’s productive capacity
EMS provides another economic benefit that is easy to overlook because we tend to measure the service by the ambulance bill rather than by the economic value of the person being treated.
Rapid emergency medical response can reduce the severity of injury and illness. When that happens, the economic consequences can include fewer days away from work, less disability, lower medical costs, and a quicker return to employment.
Sometimes a few minutes can make the difference between temporary impairment and permanent disability.
Permanent disability affects the individual, the family, the employer, insurers and government assistance programs. The economic consequences can continue for decades.
This is why the value of EMS cannot reasonably be measured simply by counting ambulance transports or comparing the cost of an ambulance against the revenue generated by transporting a patient.
The question is what happens because the ambulance was there.
6. Emergency response protects business continuity
The same principle applies to hazardous-material incidents, fires, crashes, and other emergencies.
An incident can shut down an individual business or an entire commercial district. Rapid emergency response can limit the duration and geographic reach of the disruption.
Hazardous-material enforcement and response can prevent an incident from becoming a much larger environmental and financial liability involving soil remediation, groundwater contamination, building contamination, evacuation, business interruption and legal liability.
Animal control can have an economic dimension as well. Effective response can reduce dog attacks, animal-related vehicle crashes, livestock entering roadways, property damage, and disease exposure. There can also be liability implications for property owners and local government.
Illegal-dumping enforcement protects both public and private property. An area repeatedly used as a dumping ground becomes less attractive to residents, businesses, and investors. Removing the dumping and addressing repeat offenders can help protect the surrounding property from deterioration.
Public nuisance enforcement can also restore something that rarely appears on a municipal balance sheet: productive human time.
Residents can spend enormous amounts of time dealing with chronic noise, illegal dumping, abandoned vehicles, nuisance properties, repeated trespassing, and illegal businesses.
When those problems are effectively addressed, residents get that time back.
That time can be spent working, running a business, caring for a family, or simply enjoying the community rather than repeatedly dealing with problems that should have been addressed through appropriate enforcement.
7. Public safety can reduce the private cost of security
There is another economic consequence that deserves more attention.
When people do not believe public safety is adequately protecting their property, they purchase protection themselves.
Businesses may install cameras, gates, lighting, and security systems. They may hire guards or private patrol services. Property owners may install additional locks, fencing, and other security measures.
Some of those expenditures are appropriate regardless of the effectiveness of public safety. But when businesses and residents have to purchase extensive private protection because they believe the public system isn’t functioning adequately, they incur a second cost.
I would describe that as a second tax on business: the cost of privately purchasing protection that businesses reasonably expect a public safety system to provide.
That cost can influence where businesses invest, how much they invest, and whether they invest at all.
8. Public safety is part of economic development
This brings us to a larger issue.
A company evaluating two otherwise similar communities isn’t necessarily indifferent to crime, emergency response, traffic safety, fire protection, code enforcement, and general public order.
Public safety becomes part of the community’s economic infrastructure.
The same applies to employees.
Businesses can have difficulty recruiting and retaining employees in locations that people perceive as unsafe. A community in which residents and workers feel reasonably secure can therefore provide businesses with access to a broader effective labor pool.
Tourism is another example.
Visitors make decisions about where they travel and where they spend their money. Police, fire, EMS, traffic enforcement, and code enforcement all contribute to the environment those visitors experience.
That environment affects spending at hotels, restaurants, attractions, retail stores, and transportation providers.
None of this means public safety is the only factor determining whether a business locates in a particular community. It isn’t. Taxes, labor availability, transportation, utilities, housing, regulations, markets, and many other factors matter.
But public safety is one of the factors.
9. Traffic management protects productive time
Traffic management provides another example of an economic benefit that can be difficult to see.
A crash doesn’t simply damage two vehicles. It can block a roadway and delay hundreds or thousands of people.
Disabled vehicles, crashes, and poorly managed incidents can create commuting delays, additional fuel consumption, missed appointments, delivery delays, and lost employee hours.
For commercial transportation, the consequences can multiply. A truck delayed by a major crash is not merely sitting on the road. The driver is being paid, the vehicle isn’t moving, a delivery may be delayed, and another part of the supply chain may be affected.
Effective traffic management and emergency response can reduce those secondary economic costs by restoring transportation routes as quickly and safely as possible.
10. Emergency preparedness is an economic investment
Preparedness may be the ultimate example of spending money before there is anything visible to show for it.
A community that prepares for wildfire, flood, severe storm, earthquake, or another emergency is attempting to reduce the eventual magnitude of the loss.
The economic return isn’t necessarily measured by the number of emergencies handled.
It can be measured by the losses that never occur or the losses that are significantly smaller because the community was prepared.
Wildfire provides an especially obvious example for communities throughout the West.
Effective prevention and response can preserve homes, commercial buildings, utilities, roads, water systems, businesses and taxable property. NIST has documented the enormous economic burden associated with wildfire and specifically identifies prevention, preparedness, mitigation and suppression as components of the economic analysis of wildfire losses.
Again, the economic question isn’t simply, “What did we spend on wildfire preparedness?”
It is also:
“What did that preparedness help us avoid losing?”
11. The tax base is built on protected assets
And this brings me to what I believe may be the most important point in this entire discussion. A successful community does not simply collect taxes and then spend a portion of those taxes on public safety. Public safety helps protect the very assets and economic activity that generate the taxes in the first place, and I think that connection is often missing when elected officials look at a public-safety budget.
Consider the economic chain that exists within virtually every community. A home has value, and that value contributes to the property-tax base. A business generates sales, which contribute to economic activity and, depending upon the jurisdiction, sales-tax revenue. Commercial property has value, generates rents and provides the physical space in which businesses operate and employees work. Those employees earn wages and spend money in the community, while businesses invest capital, create jobs and generate additional economic activity. None of these activities exists in isolation. They depend, to some degree, upon a functioning community in which people can live, work, invest, travel, and conduct business with a reasonable expectation that their property, employees, and customers will be protected.
That creates a much larger economic chain. A home contributes to property value, which contributes to property taxes. A business generates sales, which contribute to economic activity and sales-tax revenue. Commercial property produces value and rent while also supporting businesses and employment, contributing to both the property-tax base and broader economic activity. An employee’s employment produces household income, which is then spent throughout the community. Business investment creates jobs, and those jobs generate still more economic activity. When we look at the entire chain rather than at an individual line in a municipal budget, it becomes easier to see that public safety is helping protect the foundation upon which much of that economic activity rests.
This is why I believe elected officials should be careful about looking at public safety solely as an expenditure. The police officer, firefighter, EMT, dispatcher, code-enforcement officer, emergency manager or other public-safety professional may appear on the expenditure side of the municipal budget, but the work that person performs can protect assets and economic activity on the other side of the community’s economic ledger.
A police officer who prevents a burglary may have protected thousands of dollars in inventory and equipment, while also protecting the business owner’s confidence that the business can continue operating at that location. A traffic officer who helps prevent a serious crash may have helped prevent hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses, property damage, and lost productivity. A code-enforcement officer who addresses a chronic nuisance property may help protect the investments made by surrounding property owners by preventing one deteriorating property from contributing to the decline of an entire neighborhood. A firefighter who stops a commercial fire from destroying an entire building may preserve millions of dollars in private capital, along with the jobs and economic activity that depend upon that building remaining usable. An EMS crew that helps prevent a disabling injury may preserve years of productive employment, protecting not only the individual and the individual’s family but also the employer and the broader economy. A dispatcher who gets the right resources moving quickly may help shorten the duration and severity of an emergency, while an emergency-management team that prepares before a disaster may help prevent an enormous economic loss that otherwise would have been borne by residents, businesses, and taxpayers.
None of those benefits necessarily appear as revenue to the public agency. The police department does not receive a check because a burglary was prevented. The fire department does not send an invoice to the community for the value of a building that did not burn down. The EMS system does not book preserved earning capacity as revenue, and the emergency-management office does not receive a payment for the disaster-related losses that never occurred.
That does not make those benefits less real. In many cases, it makes them harder to see.
And that is precisely why public-safety leaders have to become better at explaining the value their organizations create. If we only show elected officials what we spend, then we should not be surprised when the conversation remains focused on expense. Our responsibility is to help them see the other side of the ledger as well: the people, property, businesses, jobs, investments and economic activity that public safety helps protect every day.
Public safety is economic infrastructure
We routinely understand the economic importance of roads, bridges, water systems, airports, utilities and communications networks because we can see them.
We should apply the same thinking to public safety.
Public safety is human infrastructure that protects physical and economic infrastructure.
The purpose of properly staffing and properly funding police, fire, EMS, 911, traffic enforcement, code enforcement, and emergency management isn’t simply to produce calls answered, reports written, citations issued, or fires extinguished.
The larger purpose is to create a community in which people can live, work, invest, travel, build businesses, employ people, and maintain property with a reasonable expectation that the community will protect the environment in which those activities occur.
That is an investment.
And like many investments, its value is sometimes most apparent when you calculate what could have been lost.
The question elected officials should ask isn’t only, “What does public safety cost us?”
It should also be:
“What does effective public safety help our community avoid losing?”
That is a very different way of looking at the public safety budget.
And it may be a much more accurate way of understanding what public safety actually contributes to the community.
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Author’s Note: The content provided in this article is designed exclusively for educational and informational purposes, reflecting opinions shaped by decades of leadership training and organizational consulting experience. It should never be interpreted as formal professional advice. By reading or engaging with this material, you acknowledge that no professional-client relationship is established and that these insights do not substitute for tailored guidance from a qualified professional familiar with your specific circumstances. Consequently, readers are strongly advised to seek independent counsel from licensed legal, financial, medical, or other appropriate advisors before implementing any strategies or making decisions based on these perspectives. Ultimately, you assume full personal responsibility for any actions you choose to take or omit as a result of reading this material, releasing the author and publisher from any liability for outcomes arising from your reliance on the text.
