Summary
The report reviews the performance of police agencies in the United States, and suggests methods for improvement. To date, performance measures for law enforcement have tended to assess how well an agency is reducing crime, but that is only part of the job. Failure to consider the broad range police activities has resulted in incomplete and biased evaluations of police service quality. This study investigates the three major difficulties confronting evaluators: -- 1. Failure to recognize that the current choice of performance measures raises questions about what the police should do, and that there is rarely consensus about what constitutes good police performance; -- 2. Lack of knowledge about how police activities produce social change; and -- 3. Difficulties in obtaining valid data. Instead of developing uniform, inflexible performance standards to apply globally to entire departments, this report suggests evaluators should ask more detailed questions about common police processes and their results. Evaluators should also develop better paradigms to describe police functions, thereby obtaining more reliable data for use by departmental policymakers.
Contents
1. Police performance measurement. -- 1.1. Police performance measurement in the twentieth century. -- 1.2. Current practices. -- 1.3. Performance measurement as a learning process. -- 1.4. Improving performance measurement. -- 2. Local police agencies. -- 2.1. Organization of local police departments. -- 2.2. Patterns of service activity. -- 2.3. Local policing in the state and federal context. -- 2.4. Local policing in the criminal justice context. -- 2.5. Summary. -- 3. What people want from the police. -- 3.1. The general public. -- 3.2. Local governing officials. -- 3.3. Other criminal justice officials. -- 3.4. Police officers' own performance expectations. -- 3.5. Summary. -- 4. What local police do. -- 4.1. Activities of officers on patrol. -- 4.2. Activities of officers assigned to investigation. -- 4.3. The need to determine what police do in greater detail. -- 5. What current records tell us about police performance. -- 5.1. Collecting and recording information. -- 5.2. Storing information. -- 5.3. Retrieving information. -- 5.4. The potential for using current police records for performance measurement. -- 6. Using models to understand police performance. -- 7. Developing valid performance models. -- 8. Threats to the quality of performance measures. -- 9. Criteria for evaluating police performance. -- 10. The future of performance measurement. -- Appendix A: the police services study: an overview. -- Appendix B: the police services study: problem type codes.