NCJ Number
174273
Journal
Law Enforcement Trainer Volume: 13 Issue: 2 Dated: March/April 1998 Pages: 6-8-31
Date Published
1998
Length
4 pages
Annotation
Components of measuring community police officer performance are examined that concern response, duration, and reaction time, as well as accuracy and error measurement, amount of activities accomplished, consumption of resources, subjective measures, rating scales, group judgments, and observations.
Abstract
Response time is the time needed to recognize a stimulus and complete an action to desired levels. Duration time is the time taken to complete an activity, or the percent of time performance is at standard. Reaction time is the time between the occurrence of an event requiring police officer action and the start of the action demanded by an event. Accuracy is the correctness of actions, responses, and terminal accomplishments. In this context, errors represent a useful performance measure, and error measurement data are particularly valuable in problem identification. The amount dimension includes the degree of success of an activity and the amount of activities accomplished. The consumption dimension involves the amount of resources used by an activity or by time. Subjective measures can lead to the quantification of performance or accomplishments, while rating scales can be used in judging observations. Group judgments are useful in measuring performance because collective judgments are sometimes more accurate than individual judgments. Observations are used to gain an understanding of many aspects of performance by directly seeing and verifying events. Practical aspects of measuring the performance of community police officers are discussed.