“It has always been the simple things that we don’t consider with these costs,’’ says Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who has focused on victim services and compensation during her 5-year tenure. “Take cleanup costs of crime scenes, where someone has been shot. Once that investigation ends and the police have left the scene and the emergency workers are gone, the residents are often left with a mess on their hands. Costs can run into the thousands - changing locks, replacing windows or doors, hazardous cleanup of blood and bodily fluids.’’
And those are just the smaller bills.
Alan Sager, public health and policy professor at Boston University, says that’s in addition to at least $200 a day for physical therapy that can last for weeks, months, or even years. If a shooting victim goes twice a week for a year, that’s $20,000. The same figures apply for mental health care, Sager said, assuming a victim is willing to undergo psychiatric therapy.
The average victim of a serious gun injury suffers physical and mental aftereffects for 20 years or more, according to Sager. That means the treatment for a single bullet wound can approach or exceed $1 million over the remainder of a victim’s life, depending on his or her age.
But there’s more, according to Sager’s Health Reform Program at BU: the cost to homeowners near a shooting scene, when their property loses value; the cost to schools that lose funding from their districts when fearful residents flee the neighborhood encompassing a shooting scene.
Coakley, in trying to determine just how much crime costs her office, persuaded the Legislature to beef up funding for the division in her office that oversees crime-scene cleanup. Among the many values they calculated were $1,500 for the average cleanup, and $500 for lock replacement, door and window repair, and other security (many homes involved in shootings are often rental properties with no insurance).
