Decision support for transparent, equitable and effective prioritisation in municipal crime prevention work

PhD project within the Industrial Doctoral School at Umeå University

This project aims to develop a decision-support framework for Swedish municipalities to systematically prioritise crime prevention interventions. By quantifying crime harm as quality-of-life losses (CALY-SWE), we seek to identify which crime causes the most significant harm and where resources can be most effectively allocated. The goal is to enhance transparency, equity, and effectiveness in municipal crime prevention efforts.

Doctoral student and supervisor

Frida Puntonet Davidila Doctoral student

Email

Lars Lindholm Professor

Email

+46 90 786 96 53

Project overview

Project period:

2025-04-01 – 2029-04-01

Funding

Industrial Doctoral School, 50 percent

Umeå Municipality, 50 percent

Participating departments and units at Umeå University

Department of Epidemiology and Global Health, Department of Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences, Unit of Police Work

Research area

Economics

Project members

Kaspar Meili Staff scientist

Email

+46 90 786 92 89

Johanna Sundqvist Associate professor, other position

Email

+46 90 786 67 21

Jan Hjelte Associate professor

Email

+46 90 786 62 98

External project members

Vanja Östman, sustainability manager, Umeå Municipality

vanja.ostman@umea.se

Project description

The research project aims to develop a user-friendly decision-support framework that enables Swedish municipalities to systematically prioritise crime prevention interventions. This framework will integrate empirical measures of harm, including capability-adjusted quality of life years (CALY-SWE), ethical principles, and economic evaluation methods. Its purpose is to support a transparent, fair and effective allocation of municipal resources.

To ensure optimal resource allocation, an economic evaluation method based on Fermi problems and adapted for municipal operations is used. This framework enables a systematic economic analysis where crime prevention interventions are compared based on their ability to generate the most 'utility' (measured in CALY-SWE saved) per invested krona. The goal is to prioritise interventions that address large problems, that is knowledge-based, and target crime areas that are currently underfunded.

The research encompasses several key questions:

Identifying ethical theories to inform principles for assessing harm severity and ensuring the inclusion of marginalised victims.
Deriving and validating CALY-SWE weights for crime victimisation to quantify harm severity in a standardised scoring system.
Estimating the reduction in CALY-SWE loss resulting from municipal crime prevention interventions and translating these estimates into a metric of additional CALY-SWE saved per SEK 10,000.
Determining the necessary user-centered features for a municipal decision-support framework to prioritise crime prevention effectively.

The framework will encompass 14 crime categories, as defined by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) of the Swedish Ministry of Justice and will specifically investigate inequalities in harm distribution based on factors such as age, gender, and socioeconomic status. The goal is to provide multi-dimensional harm description, and a user-friendly framework that assists municipalities in prioritization, and complementary estimates of crime harm distribution and inequality across population groups.

A first prototype of the prioritisation framework is expected to be tested in Umeå municipality during 2027.

Latest update: 2026-03-03