Performance Evaluation of Police Departments

Among other things, police departments can be seen as producing organizations: They take resources from their environment, and they use those resources to produce results. In general, citizens give police departments two key resources they need to operate: money and the authority of the state. Using their professional expertise, the police deploy these resources through a particular set of activities, such as patrol, criminal investigation, and traffic enforcement. These activities, in turn, produce an immediate set of results: surveillance of public spaces, rapid response to calls for service, arrests, and citations. These immediate results are, in turn, thought to be related to socially desirable results such as reduced crime, reduced traffic fatalities, and the kind of justice we associate with calling offenders to account.

When we think of police departments as organizations that spend valuable resources to produce [Page 325]results, it is natural to wonder about the value produced by the organization relative to the costs of providing it. This requires us to think about what we should recognize and count as the valuable results produced by a police organization.

For the most part, police leaders, citizens, and academics have had to content themselves with a small number of routinely created and traditionally recognized performance measures: (a) crimes reported to the police, and (b) arrests made (and cases cleared) by the police. With the advent of computer-aided dispatch systems to manage patrol forces, police departments have also been able to report regularly on their response times to calls for service.

In recent years, the various stakeholders interested in evaluating the performance of the police have become less content with these traditional measures. First, reported crime is imperfectly correlated with the actual level of victimization and not well connected with citizen fear. Second, the police produce more products and services than simply reducing crime and calling offenders to account; they engage in a wide range of activities that includes providing important kinds of emergency medical and social services and engaging young people in athletic activity. Third, existing measures do not capture whether the police are being economical with scarce taxpayer monies and, most importantly, whether the citizens who are served by the police felt that they were being well and justly served—that those who called the police felt that they got an acceptable response from these public servants, and that those who were cited or arrested by the police at least had their rights protected in the encounter.

Many of these new understandings about the effects that the police produced on communities, and the methods they used to produce these effects, were captured in a changed understanding of what the mission and strategy of the police should be. This new conception of the overall ends and means of the police has been variously called community policing, problem-oriented policing, or community problem-solving policing. As the conception of the important ends and means of policing changed, so did the ideas about how to measure the performance of the police.

At present, the best means of evaluating the performance of the police is not a settled matter; it is a contested issue. The debate is not simply about the technical issues of what is feasible to measure, and what the best ways are to measure the effects that interest us; it is also about the political and philosophical question of what we would like a police department to be, what we would like it to produce, and what we think are the best methods of producing the desired results. Some key strategic issues in evaluating the performance of police departments are presented below.

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