NCJ Number
79303
Journal
Criminal Justice Review Volume: 5 Issue: 2 Dated: (Fall 1980) Pages: 34-40
Date Published
1980
Length
7 pages
Annotation
The impact of police expenditures, manpower, municipal police effort, technological innovations, and police reform on measures of crime -- Uniform Crime Reports data, arrests, and victimization reports -- are examined.
Abstract
The productivity of police in 25 large American cities was examined. The crime data sources were combined to produce three measures of police output, expressed as ratios. The effectiveness ratio is a measure of the number of arrests over the victimization rate of each city. The clearance ratio is the number of arrests over the number of crimes reported to the police, and the detection ratio is the official crime data over the rate of victimization. The analysis attempted to relate the five police characteristics identified in the police evaluation literature to each of the three output measures. Findings indicate that no single police variable had a uniform impact on all three crime measures and that no single crime measure who affected in a similar way by the five police variables. The results suggest that the wrong measures were chosen. Although police are evaluated most frequently according to their impact on crime, considerably more time is spent on activities not directly related to crime. Evaluations of police effectiveness might be more realistic if they included more comprehensive measures of police outcome and police variables measured at a lower level of aggregation, such as the district, precinct, watch, or individual officer level. Tabular data, a note, 2 footnotes, and 24 references are provided.