Costing and Pricing of Police Services

Examines the principles which underlie the costing of police services when these services do not fit the rubric of being purely“public” goods. In such instances, it is necessary to determine a unit cost for charging a user fee. As the unit price(marginal cost) of the goods is charged, either across the agency or to outsiders who purchase the service, efficiency in terms of appropriate allocation of resources is enhanced. Also, the police board is then in a better position to argue for funding for those services which contain a greater degree of “publicness”, since the benefits of these remaining police services clearly have some element of indivisibility,and thus benefit society rather than individuals.