Yak - Chapter 22 Measuring Police Performance

Dark figure of crime

Crimes that are never reported to the police, and as a result, the police have no ability to investigate them and make arrests.

Metro-Dade Police Citizen Violence Reduction Project

Designed to enhance officers' ability to defuse potentially violent situations by drawing on the work of Hans Toch, who has suggested "that the best ways of minimizing violence between police and citizens were to harness and articulate the overlooked expertise of street cops, the people most qualified by experience-and necessity-to prescribe guidelines for averting bloodshed" (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993, p. 183).

Patrol allocation

Distribution of officers to patrol. Should be based on standard workload formula; time of day, location, issues.

Discuss three new measures of police performance at the individual officer level.

Expanding and Enhancing the Evaluation Process, Expanding the Purposes and Assumptions of Performance Evaluation, Two Examples of Contemporary Performance Evaluation (Peer Evaluations, Community Satisfaction and Community Contacts). *****Pages 650-656 for discussion*****

National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS)

Implemented in 1989 by the FBI as a means of improving upon the traditional UCR reporting system (described above). NIBRS is an incident-based reporting system, with an incident defined as "one or more offenses committed by the same offender or group of offenders acting in concert, and at the same time and place" (U.S. DOJ. 2000). *Page 644

Peer evaluation

Many scholars have argued that a police officer's peers and co-workers are best suited to assess his or her performance on the job. There have been a number of studies demonstrating the viability of the peer evaluation approach.

Numbers game

Measuring performance in quantitative terms.

What is the "numbers game"? Explain its limitations for assessing police officer performance.

Measuring performance in quantitative terms. Measuring performance based on numbers does not always equate to good policing. The numbers do not account for quality.

Discuss three new measures of police performance at the departmental level.

NIBRS, Community Satisfaction Surveys, Identifying Measurable Outcomes. *****Pages 644-650 for discussion*****

Community satisfaction

New outcome worthy of consideration, particularly for departments that have espoused community policing. The measure can be employed to assess an individual officer's performance. Supervisors can speak routinely with community leaders, residents, and business owners to gauge the performance of the officer or officers working that particular beat.

Uniform Crime reports (UCR)

Primary measure for assessing the effectiveness of a police department have involve crime: reported crimes (published annually in the UCR by the FBI), clearance rates (arrests), and response time.

What are the primary limitations of crime-related measures of performance evaluation for police?

The reliance on crime-related indices to determine police performance is wrought with problems. In simple terms, police performance has typically been determined by measuring an activity where two thirds of the work is missed, that represents only a small part of their overall responsibilities, that often does not involve the best course of action, and for which the causes far exceed their reach. This would be akin to measuring a doctor's performance by counting how many instruments he or she used during an operation, or a college professor assigning grades based on how often students came to class.

Explain why the police have an unclear mandate. What are the implications of this for performance measurement?

There is a given diversity in responsibilities. The complexity of the Police role developed mostly because of their availability, their quick response time, and their authority. Westley says that police have assumed responsibility for all of these problems because policing involves society's "dirty work", the tasks that no one else is interested in handling. The complexity of the police role and their unclear mandate has a number of important consequences for police. Police are sometimes put in situations where two or more responsibilities conflict. Unclear mandate has led to unfair and exaggerated expectations of the police on the part of the community. Unclear mandate makes it very difficult for police to accurately measure police performance, both among individual officers and the department as a whole.

Response time

Time it takes an officer to arrive at the scene of an incident from the time the call is received by dispatch, or from the time the officer received the call from dispatch.

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)

a national-level survey of 49,000 residents conducted annually by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Justice Statistics since 1972. Collects in-depth, self-reported data on victimization, and results show significant disparity with levels of report crime.

Police mandate

is a hodge-podge of of conflicting duties and responsibilities that developed over time with little input from police.

Clearance rates

is calculated by dividing the number of crimes that are "cleared" (a charge being laid) by the total number of crimes recorded. Clearance rates are used by various groups as a measure of crimes solved by the police.

Police-population ratio

standardized measure of police protection that allows departments to track their own staffing levels over time and to make fair comparisons between their levels and the levels of other police agencies.