NCJ Number
190684
Date Published
July 2001
Length
6 pages
Annotation
This report first describes how Great Britain's Home Office created "families" (similar policing and crime-reduction areas grouped for comparative purposes) and then presents tables to show the average, minimum, and maximize size of the various "families."
Abstract
The" families" were created to provide a basis for the national publication of crime statistics at a local level; to help forces and police authorities undertake best-value reviews by enabling them to compare local-level performance across a range of functions or processes; to help local areas identify those in their "family" that had the lowest crime rates and were most successful at reducing crime; and to assist inspections at the Basic Command Unit (BCU) level. The families were created by using cluster analysis, a statistical technique that involves identifying which variables could be used to characterize entities and differentiate between them. Individual entities (BCUs and Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships [CDRP]) were gradually combined on the basis of their similarities, each being allocated to the family to which they had the nearest "fit" across all the variables. Eventually, the number of families reached an optimum point. This optimum point was one where the trade-off between the number of members in each family and the number of families allowed a meaningful comparison between family members, with each family retaining a distinct and separate identity. For the final sets of families, the average family size consisted of 24 BCUs and 29 CDRPs; the largest family consisted of 42 BCUs and 62 CDRPs; and the smallest family consisted of 6 BCUs and 3 CDRPs. 1 figure and 2 references