Voluntary work if often considered hectic and sometimes thankless. It becomes even more daunting when the practice involves intensive fields such as law enforcement. Yet, the need to make an impact on the community keeps volunteers streaming into the law enforcement sector across the world. Volunteer law enforcers pride themselves in working to make their communities safer, free of crime, and better. As the volunteers find a sense of self-fulfillment, the law enforcement agencies and, by extension, their countries reap substantial economic benefits. The general economic advantage of volunteering in law enforcement includes a reduction in costs associated with crime prevention and law enforcement. The following research discusses the economic benefit of volunteering in law enforcement in countries such as Britain, the U.S.A., Singapore, and the UAE.
Overview of Crime Rates
Understanding the positive economic impacts of volunteering in law enforcement necessitates a prior review of the associated costs and budgets. The major economic advantage of volunteering in the law enforcement sector is its ability to reduce crime rates. According to Gravelle and Rogers (2009), law enforcement, in the recent past, has been facing challenges of increasing finances amidst a constantly growing demand for services, higher expenditures, and budget-cuts. In Britain, policing consumes billions of pounds annually, with rough estimates quoting 60 billion pounds (Gravelle & Rogers, 2009). This observation is against a budget of just 10 billion pounds in 2007 (Gravelle & Rogers, 2009). Therefore, in the year 2007, the British Home Office had a deficit of over 50 billion pounds, which accounts for more than 80%. Under these circumstances, it is impossible to ensure the effectiveness of law enforcement because apart from technological resources, there will be no enough human resources to maintain law and order. In addition to the deficit, the average crime cost per person was estimated at 275 pounds, which totals to a national figure of 15 billion pounds every year (Gravelle & Rogers, 2009). These figures are based on typical or average crime rates. However, Elkin (2019) notes a 2% increase in the rate of crime between 1981 and 2018. As these rates increase, so do the costs. In the U.S.A., the overall rate of crime has significantly fallen between 1993 and 2018. Gramlich (2019) estimates that the rate of violent crimes has seen a 51% decrease, while property crimes have dropped by 54% over the same period. Overall crime is still in Singapore, with over 33,126 cases recorded in 2018, marking a slight increase from 32,668 the previous year (Ministry of Home Affairs - Singapore Police Force, 2019). The UAE has just 0.7 murders per 100,000 people and is considered among the regions with the lowest rate of crimes in the world (Salama, 2018).