Police and Noncrime Services (From Evaluating Performance of Criminal Justice Agencies, P 33-61, 1983, Gordon P Whitaker and Charles D Phillips, ed. - See NCJ-92180)

• NCJ Number: 92182
• Author(s): S Mastrofski
• Date Published: 1983
• Length: 29 pages
• Sale Source: Sage Publications, Inc
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Earlier version presented at the 1982 annual convention of the American Society of Criminology in Toronto.

Annotation

In considering issues relevant to the evaluation of police noncrime services, this paper scrutinizes the crime-noncrime distinction, explores the relationship between police performance in crime and noncrime matters, and examines the distribution of the supply and demand of noncrime services to assess the likely distributional impacts of altering the police role in noncrime services.

Abstract

The empirical analysis in this paper is based on data collected in 1977 in three metropolitan areas by the Police Services Study. The project studied patrol services in 60 urban residential neighborhoods served by 24 police departments. Although the police occupational values clearly regard noncrime work as second rate, some research and reform literature raises the possibility that the quality of police crime control may be influenced by noncrime efforts. There have been few empirical assessments of the crime prophylactic, police knowledge, social work, and community cooperation models, although some support for the community cooperation model is found in the data presented here comparing citizen evaluations of the police response to both crime and noncrime requests for service. Citizens are more likely to be pleased and less likely to be displeased with police response to noncrime incidents compared to crime incidents. Most research fails to find systematic police favoritism among social classes in the distribution of services, but measurement and aggregation problems may distort actual allocational patterns. The evidence presented here shows two distinct distributional patterns among households of different income categories. Lower-income groups request police assistance at a higher rate for serious crime, order maintenance, and assistance problems, but wealthier groups ask for police help at a higher rate for all other types of problems. The findings neither confirm nor deny the wisdom of altering current police involvement in noncrime matters. The diffusion of different police behaviors across incident categories makes it diffcult to reduce the noncrime workload simply by refusing to dispatch officers to certain types of incidents. Implications of findings for police performance measurement are discussed. Forty-seven references are provided.