Estimating the costs of state mandates: The county law enforcement and justice system in Arizona

This article addresses the problems and opportunities of on-site cost estimation of state mandates on the law enforcement and justice system in five Arizona counties. On-site cost estimation was time consuming and costly, involving a great deal of travel with numerous return visits to conduct hundreds of interviews with county staff throughout 68 departments. Estimates are based on qualitative as well as quantitative data and thus limited to conveying a general sense of the costs of carrying out a mandate in a given year. On-site data collection also provided opportunities to gain new perspectives on the workings of the law-justice system, on state-county funding arrangements, on the need to view the law-justice system as an interrelated whole, and on the utility of considering community value along with costs of the law-justice system.