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This paper models the effects on crash fatalities and costs of 20 years of legislative actions resulting from Federal and state advocacy efforts. We catalogued road safety laws passed between 1990 and 2009 and motorcycle helmet law repeals that advocacy efforts narrowly defeated. We used NHTSA's estimates of lives saved by airbags and published estimates of the percentage reduction in related crash fatalities associated with each type of law. State by state and year by year, from the actual fatality count for the year, we modeled how many fatalities each state's laws averted. We assumed, somewhat shakily, that the percentage reduction in nonfatal injury costs would mirror the fatality reduction. We used crash cost estimates for 10 years between 1990 and 2008 to estimate total crash costs from 1990–2009. The costs were built from NHTSA's estimates of cost per crash. The state laws passed included 113 occupant protection laws, 131 impaired driving laws, and 76 teen driving laws, plus a Federal airbag mandate. These laws saved an estimated 120,000 lives. The life-saving benefits accelerated as the number of laws in force grew. By 2009, they resulted in 25% fewer crash fatalities. The largest life-saving benefits sprang from airbag, belt use, and impaired driving laws. Laws that affect narrow subpopulations had more modest impacts. The laws reduced insurance costs by more than $210 billion and saved government an estimated $42 billion. Including the value of lost quality of life, estimated savings exceeded $1.3 trillion. Legislative advocacy is truly a spark plug in the safety engine.

Background: No one knows whether the temporality of nonfatal deliberate self-harm in the United States mirrors the temporality of suicide deaths. Aims: To analyze day- and month-specific variation in population rates for suicide fatalities and, separately, for hospital admissions for nonfatal deliberate self-harm. Methods: For 12 states, we extracted vital statistics data on all suicides (n = 11,429) and hospital discharge data on all nonfatal deliberate self-harm admissions (n = 60,870) occurring in 1997. We used multinomial logistic regression to analyze the significance of day-to-day and month-to-month variations in the occurrence of suicides and nonfatal deliberate self-harm admissions. Results: Both fatal and nonfatal events had a 6%–10% excess occurrence on Monday and Tuesday and were 5%–13% less likely to occur on Saturdays (p < .05). Males were more likely than females to act on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Nonfatal admission rates were 6% above the average in April and May (p < .05). In contrast, suicide rates were 6% above the average in February and March and 8% below it in November (p < .05). Conclusions: Suicides and nonfatal hospital admissions for deliberate self-harm have peaks and troughs on the same days in the United States. In contrast, the monthly patterns for these fatal and nonfatal events are not congruent.

AbstractTotal cost estimates for crime in the USA are both out-of-date and incomplete. We estimated incidence and costs of personal crimes (both violent and non-violent) and property crimes in 2017. Incidence came from national arrest data, multi-state estimates of police-reported crimes per arrest, national victimization and road crash surveys, and police underreporting studies. We updated and expanded upon published unit costs. Estimated crime costs totaled $2.6 trillion ($620 billion in monetary costs plus quality of life losses valued at $1.95 trillion; 95 % uncertainty interval $2.2–$3.0 trillion). Violent crime accounted for 85 % of costs. Principal contributors to the 10.9 million quality-adjusted life years lost were sexual violence, physical assault/robbery, and child maltreatment. Monetary expenditures caused by criminal victimization represent 3 % of Gross Domestic Product – equivalent to the amount spent on national defense. These estimates exclude the additional costs of preventing and avoiding crime such as enhanced lighting and burglar alarms. They also exclude crimes against businesses and most white-collar and corporate offenses.