Gary, Indiana samuelalove on flickr Cities that cut police budgets to save costs may be shooting themselves in the foot.

A recent study by Aaron Chaflin and Justin McCrary at UC Berkeley found that for every dollar spent on police, the average U.S. city can expect about $1.60 in reduced crime costs.

"Our estimates suggest that if you increase police officers by 10 percent, you can get something like a 5 percent reduction in cost of crime," McCrary told The Baltimore Sun. "For cities with a high level of crime, where police are relatively inexpensive, that's a tradeoff a city should be willing to make."

The benefits of increased police spending vary greatly by city.

Some places are actually overpoliced, including small, low-poverty cities like Sunnyvale, Calif. and Waltham, Mass. Other places are drastically underpoliced, like Gary, Ind., where $1 in police spending could save $14 in crime reduction.

Chalfin and McCrary collected data spanning from 1960-2010 for 242 cities that have at least 50,000 residents. The researchers calculated victimization costs by taking into account direct costs of crimes, such as the value of a stolen car, as well as emotional costs.