Measuring What Matters Part One: Measures of Crime, Fear, and Disorder                 .
Series: NIJ Research in Action
Published: December 1996
44 pages
76,895 bytes

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

National Institute of Justice
Research in Action

Jeremy Travis, Director
December 1996

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Measuring What Matters
Part One: Measures of Crime, Fear, and Disorder
by Thomas V. Brady

America develops yardsticks for its major concerns.
We measure everything from the productivity of
factory workers to rates of infectious illness to
the endurance of shortstops. When it comes to
public safety, the measurement familiar to most
people is whether reported crime is up or down. But
other ways exist to gauge crime and its effects as
well as to measure the performance of police who
share responsibility for public safety. They are
the products of research, development, and practice
that began 30 years ago and are still evolving.
This report listens in on a candid, wide-ranging
discussion of crime, policing, and these measures.
We hear the distinct voices and opinions of police
chiefs, researchers and scholars, and leaders of
community organizations.

The value of the discussion is plain for those who
see the need to assess both crime and police
performance in accurate, useful, and innovative
ways. Crime exacts a tremendous toll on
communities. The police are one of the most
expensive parts of local government. They are also
most communities' only 24-hour-a-day service agency
and the face of local government to many citizens.
And, as anyone familiar with the term community
policing may know, police agencies are changing the
way they operate. Questions arise. For example:
What should the police be doing? How do we know
when they are doing it?

Many people have an official interest in
measurements of crime and the police. They include
mayors, city council members, county supervisors,
and local government managers as well as
policymakers and other officials at the State and
Federal levels. In addition, community and
neighborhood leaders, businesspeople, and plenty of
other citizens may want to know about these
measurements. Crime is often one of their major
concerns. The police are key to resolving those
concerns. Finally, students of government and
criminal justice and the police rank and file have
an obvious interest in the subject.

In late November 1995, 45 police officials,
criminal justice scholars and researchers, and
community organization representatives met for a
day of discussion on the topic "Measuring What
Matters." The meeting's purpose, according to
Jeremy Travis, Director of the National Institute
of Justice (NIJ), was "a critical examination of
the relationship between police performance and
indicators such as crime, fear, disorder, and
citizen satisfaction with police service in the
context of changing philosophies of policing."

The meeting was the inaugural session of NIJ's
Policing Research Institute. It was held in
cooperation with the Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services (COPS), another agency of the
U.S. Department of Justice. "We need to look at and
evaluate ourselves and our organizations and what
we are trying to do in a different light," Joseph
E. Brann, a former police chief and now director of
the COPS Office, told the meeting.

Two more meetings related to "Measuring What
Matters" are scheduled for 1996. The second meeting
will explore what it means as a police agency to be
customer oriented and accountable to the public.
The final meeting will address the organizational
issues involved in implementing effective
outcome-based police performance measures.

Answers From Different Worlds

Two questions formed the basis of the day's
discussion:

1. How do we measure the amount of crime, disorder,
and fear and their effects on the quality of
community life?

2. Should we expect police activities to impact on
measures of crime, disorder, and fear, and how will
we know?

The answers came, in the words of one participant,
from "different worlds."

Police leaders "see measurement as a device for
improving accountability in performance," said Mark
H. Moore, a professor at Harvard University's
Kennedy School of Government. "They need to
understand [the] what and how of these measures so
they can survive." In contrast, researchers and
academics are interested "in the accuracy of
measures.... They are interested in the accuracy
with which attribution can be made of effects to
causes," Moore continued. So police and academics
seek different things, he said. "They're just
different worlds that we're living in."

The different worlds were interpreted by a former
police chief who is now an academic. "There is an
action-orientation on [the part of] a growing
number of police chiefs.... The police chiefs are
saying that they are not going to wait for the
thoughtful research that I hear talked about at the
table today," said Gerald Williams, a former police
chief of Aurora, Colorado, who is now director of
the Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management
Institute at Sam Houston State University. "Rather,
they're going to try something. If it works,
they'll continue to do that. If it doesn't work,
they'll try something else."

But to say that police and researchers come from
different worlds doesn't mean that they lined up as
polar opposites in the meeting. There were shared
observations on topics such as communities,
measuring the process of policing, and citizens'
expectations of the police.

On communities, for example, a police chief, Robert
Ford of Port Orange, Florida, said, "The diversity
within communities is phenomenal. Our belief now is
that every time we go to solve a problem, we create
another problem for ourselves from another group."
And a scholar, Peter K. Manning of Michigan State
University, talked about "aggregated measures which
do not take into account political, cultural,
social realities.... Unless and until measurement
is based on some sense of community boundaries --
whether it's political or moral boundaries within
that group of people who live there and interact --
it doesn't make any sense because you're collapsing
apples and oranges, horses, mules, and so on."

Discussion of the second question focused in
considerable part on the view of William R.
Bratton, then police commissioner of New York City,
that management changes and goal setting in his
department were primary catalysts in the steep
decline in the city's crime rate during the
previous 2 years. Not all police chiefs at the
meeting fully accepted Bratton's claim; not all
researchers rejected it. "All the things that we
[not just the police but the community, other
agencies of government, the business community, and
neighborhoods] do are at play in crime reduction,"
said Dennis E. Nowicki, chief of the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Police
Department. According to George L. Kelling,
professor of criminal justice at Northeastern
University, "Something very powerful is happening
in New York City and in some other cities. My own
interpretation...might be the same as Bill's...."

Readers will find plain speaking in the report. For
example, Chief Tom Koby of the Boulder, Colorado,
Police Department said he attended the meeting
"with a healthy skepticism, quite frankly, about
what researchers and academics can provide us. I
don't see a lot." And Wesley G. Skogan, a political
science professor at Northwestern University, wrote
in a paper for the meeting, "Commissioner Bratton
has been quoted in reputable sources to the effect
that his `bottom line' is crime reduction. This is
an unfortunate view; for example, reforms that
managed to substantially heal the breech between
the races over police conduct might be a more
significant accomplishment."

Readers will also find an occasionally wry
perspective by participants about their
professions' efforts. "Much of our difficulty in
measurement stems from our effort to constantly use
global, all-encompassing terms -- the trinity of
crime, disorder, and fear -- which for me has no
greater meaning than disease, illness, and the
associated anxieties," said Herman Goldstein, a law
professor at the University of Wisconsin. "People
in the community [have expectations of the police]
that aren't very real, and a lot of the ideas we
have about people in the community...aren't very
real either," said Chief Darrel Stephens of the St.
Petersburg, Florida, Police Department.

Some of the most useful comments and observations
stand alone as sidebars to the main text. In both,
we hear the views of meeting participants in their
own words.

How Do We Measure the Amount of Crime, Disorder,
and Fear and Their Effects on the Quality of
Community Life?

Three papers -- by Wesley G. Skogan, a political
science professor at Northwestern University; by
Chief Darrel W. Stephens, St. Petersburg, Florida,
Police Department; and by Ralph Taylor, a professor
of criminal justice at Temple University -- were
prepared as background for the discussion of the
first question. Each author gave a brief
presentation before the start of a general
discussion.

Skogan distinguished between what he called
high-tech evaluations of police performance and
initiatives and "monitoring and assessing, the kind
of routine evaluation that intelligent and
self-directed police departments need to build into
their operations." The latter need to be timely,
completed on schedule, inexpensive, and done with
existing personnel. High-tech evaluations, however,
are not routine. They "are done patiently and very
strategically [and] are both extensive and pretty
expensive to mount." According to Skogan, "Both
high-tech and routine self-monitoring evaluations
share two concerns: first, measuring what matters,
and second, measuring in a way that matters, in a
way that we can draw inferences about things which
are defensible and demonstrable."

According to Skogan, in both types of evaluations,
the people involved -- the evaluators -- must start
with the "logic model of the program...which is
really critical. Logic models have four components
-- intervention, context, mechanism, and outcome.
Without specifying exactly the logic model of a
program, you're never going to get very far in even
describing it, much less evaluating it.

"The intervention has to do with what you're doing,
the level of effort.

"The context has to do with the circumstances and
the surroundings in which the intervention is being
put in place.

"The mechanism is how exactly the program is
suppose to affect the outcome. If it is an
ombudsman policing experiment...how exactly is it
that the thing will mobilize services, and what
kind of services can they mobilize? How exactly is
it that the effort can be sustained during the
hours and days that officers are on patrol?

"The outcomes are what the anticipated impacts of
the program are, so those anticipated impacts have
to be things that are carefully tuned to be
responsive to the intervention in the context."

Thus, Skogan said, in both self-monitoring and
high-tech evaluations, "We need to be concerned
about the logic -- the inference -- that it was the
program that made a difference." He said that both
types of evaluations are interested in specific
outcomes but very rarely in "macro things like
burglary or homicide." For example, Skogan
proposed, if the outcome measure is burglary, "Are
we talking about commercial or residential? If
street crime, day or night?" He added: "Figuring
out exactly what the fine-grain micromeasures
should be so that they can be responsive to the
logic model" is one of the things that is important
for evaluators and police practitioners to
negotiate.

Stephens discussed the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR),
city-by-city figures on major felonies that are
collected and published by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. "Despite all the limitations of the
UCR, it's our only real tool that...police
departments have to talk about crime that's
happening in the community.... The reality is that
periodically we get held to account for those
numbers by media and the public."

He added that "crime and disorder and fear are
important...things to measure, but there is a
range...of other things that tell us something
about what we do that makes a difference in our
communities." Those things include "listening to
the people we serve. Spending time [in neighborhood
and community meetings] we hear things that are
important to people," and these things may not
necessarily fall under categories such as fear and
disorder.

Some people, Stephens said, want to dismiss
information that comes in through calls from
citizens:

"I think call information is of critical
importance. It's a major untapped source of
knowledge about what people care about in the
community and where problems are actually at...."

"Of greatest importance, if you really want to
measure anything...you've got to focus real hard on
neighborhoods. You've got to build from the
neighborhood up.... If we can focus our energies
and efforts in policing nationally on doing the
best we can with neighborhoods and working on
problems with those neighborhoods, then we can, in
fact, understand a lot more about what we do and
the impact of what we do and then build up from
there to a citywide perspective."

Taylor's presentation was a summary of his paper,
"Going over Grime Reduction: Community Policing
Initiatives and Signs of Incivility." The paper
provides an example of the considerations, details,
and terminology involved in the researcher's
thorough attempt to address something that matters.
Taylor's subject is community disorder, which he
calls "a broad and at times elusive concept,
referring to social and physical conditions and
events in a community, beyond the serious [Part I]
crimes occurring there." His goal is to "address
different conceptual, measurement, and 
policy-related issues surrounding various measures
of community disorder."

At the heart of his paper is Taylor's consideration
of four different ways of assessing signs of
incivility: survey based, onsite assessments,
archival, and ethnographic. He describes the
practical advantages and disadvantages of each. His
conclusion is that these measures generally score
well on reliability benchmarks (internal
consistency and inter-rater reliability among
raters), but, in the language of social science,
"important questions related to construct and
criterion validity remain. Convergent validity,
discriminant validity, and criterion validity have
not been established."

Taylor identifies several questions "needing
answers.... When people are telling us about
perceived problems in their community or on their
block, what do these reports represent? When onsite
raters assess physical and social conditions on
urban blocks, are those conditions so closely tied
to neighborhood structure that they should be
viewed as just reflecting structure? Or are they
capturing something different?"

The discussion that followed the presentations
amounted to a 3-hour bouillabaisse, in the words of
Francis Hartmann, the meeting moderator and
executive director of the Program in Criminal
Justice Policy and Management at Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government. The
ingredients included many perspectives on what
matters. Following are excerpts from the
discussion.

About Communities

Michael E. Clark, president of the Citizens
Committee for New York City, said that, "From the
community perspective...on the subject of what
matters, I see at least four clear things that jump
out.... First [are] serious crimes that also cause
community disorder.... Second are less-than-serious
crimes that also cause community disorder.... Third
is fear of crime.... Last...is noncriminal
disorder.... I fear like a lot of people that too
much of what we now call community policing has
come to be focused on number four [cleaning up
parks and other public places, graffiti removal,
etc.]...as opposed to what the community is really
worried about."

Clark said, "The biggest thing that strikes me is
the failure to apply some fairly simple, very
well-developed market research tools" to measure
what worries the community. "If you had an ongoing
panel of citizens to talk to you about performance
and victimization and other issues, including
trust, I don't see how that's so enormously
expensive or beyond our powers. I think it would be
enormously powerful to start to move us toward what
matters to the community...it would allow
communities...to begin to assess the performance of
their [police] precincts. If you think of policing
as community service [there ought to be measures to
assess that service]...and you ought to put those
measures in the hands of citizens who pay the
bills."

Warren Friedman of the Chicago Alliance for
Neighborhood Safety said, "Communities seem to me
very involved, absolutely critical to making safer
neighborhoods." But they were not reflected in
papers prepared for the meeting "as something to
measure, something to look at, something as
critical."

David Duffee, professor of criminal justice at the
University at Albany, said he was bothered "by two
large absences" in papers prepared for the meeting.
He said there was "a lot of discussion about crime,
disorder, and fear in relationship to some rather
immediate structural characteristics of the
community such as class and racial composition....
But I don't see any discussion about those larger
forces" in struggling communities "which have a lot
to do with where capital is located, what large
economic elites decide to do with cities in terms
of dislocating groups of people, housing
policies.... We need to get some discussion about
those very large forces that create a great deal of
disorder...in order to ask whether the police can
have any...lasting impact on disorder in the
community."

Duffee also said, "There ought to be some
discussion about the traditional role of the police
in the community [that] historically [was] to
preserve the order that we have even though that
order includes the fact that there are going to be
some very disorderly neighborhoods. The police have
often been asked to replicate or maintain the
economic and political order as it stands...."

Robert Sampson, professor of sociology at the
University of Chicago, discussed community
policing. He said, "The real issue for community
policing, at least one major issue, is the extent
to which not so much are the police able to pull it
off but how are they able to bring the community
into it in the sense of helping or leading the
community to take responsibility itself for many
[problems]."

Clarence Harmon, former chief of police, St. Louis,
Missouri, questioned "the utility of thinking only
of the community in terms of citizens and the
police. I think there is a larger dynamic made up
of governmental and public institutions that impact
on what the police do.... For instance, what can
happen when you try to measure the impact of
community policing in St. Louis in some
neighborhoods...is that there is lower citizen
satisfaction with the process merely because the
jails simply can't confine [offenders and they are
back on the streets]. My point in a broad, sweeping
way is that you've got to consider all the
components that make up the...entities that impact
on the ability of the police to be successful at
whatever outcomes we define for success."

Johnnie Johnson, chief, Birmingham, Alabama, Police
Department, said, "Nobody has any problem with me
going through my processes as long as they produce
the community's expected outcomes. If they don't,
then I need to review my processes. I told the
mayor, `Mr. Mayor, I want to look at whether or not
I do what I said I am going to do.' He says,
`Johnny, I want to know how many fewer homicides
you're going to have, how many fewer robberies
you're going to have.... That's what our community
needs.' When it comes down to working at home, we
have to deal with our communities. And inside the
city, there [are several] communities. I've got one
community that's concerned about burglaries...and
another that's concerned about speeders.... The
other question that comes up is, `How has the onset
of drugs had an impact on solvability?` Those are a
lot of issues that've got to be measured, but, at
the same time, there's got to be a practical
approach to policing."

Robert Ford, chief, Port Orange, Florida, Police
Department, said, "The diversity within communities
is phenomenal. Our belief now is that every time we
go to solve a problem, we create yet another
problem for ourselves from another group. So, for
example, if the senior citizens are concerned about
youth groups gathering, we solve that problem, and
that creates another problem with parents of youths
who feel we are picking on the kids.... When you
get to the more mid-level problems, the extent of
the diversity becomes clearer."

Peter K. Manning, professor of criminal justice at
Michigan State University, raised another issue
about measuring the reactions of communities. "One
of the difficulties involved in the measurements
that have been done...is that they are aggregated
measures which do not take into account political,
cultural, social realities.... Unless and until
measurement is based on...some sense of community
boundaries -- whether it's political or moral
boundaries within that group of people who live
there and interact -- it doesn't make any sense
because you're collapsing apples and oranges,
horses, mules, and so on. You're not measuring the
same thing. So that any study has to begin with
some kind of cultural articulation of what the
meaningful boundaries of people's neighborhoods
are. Until that's...sensibly done, and built into
our understanding and analysis, we will continue to
have this aggregated data which are about as useful
as some...census data."

Carl B. Klockars, professor of criminal justice at
the University of Delaware, considered communities
and order maintenance. "I've heard discussion about
how we get the community involved.... There is
another way to ask that question...namely, the
community asking in what do we want to get the
police involved.... The proper locus [for]
responsibility for disorder in anything which
resembles a real community...is the community
itself. That's the place it's got to happen. I
think it may be misguided on the part of police to
claim responsibility for that [order maintenance]
within communities.... Communities have to
understand that they're the ones who can do
something about" disorder.

Mark H. Moore, professor at the Kennedy School of
Government, raised a separate question about
measuring communities: "Do we aggregate results
inside a police department at the level of
individual communities or citywide? ... It would be
helpful to partnerships at local community levels
with police departments if we somehow or other had
the capacity...to aggregate at microcommunity
levels as well as citywide.... To the extent that
we decide that's an important thing to be able to
do, that will increase the burden on reporting and
measuring systems because it's one thing to capture
performance at a citywide level. It's even more
expensive and difficult to capture performance at a
more microlevel, but it may be terribly important
that we do that and we just suck it up and pay the
money to get the job done."

Bennie Click, chief, Dallas Police Department, said
he was "not so sure that aggregate evaluation does
a lot.... Once officers...identify [a] neighborhood
[and] that neighborhood identifies with those
police officers, it becomes much easier to measure
within that small, that very small geographic area,
the impact of changing something, doing something
within that particular neighborhood to...reduce
crime or whatever it is.... On a citywide level, I
am not sure what aggregate numbers tell you."

Mark Moore also observed, "One of the ways in which
we have brought the community into the discussion
of what matters is by -- almost without noticing it
-- enlarging our concept of what matters from crime
to [include] disorder and fear.... Now that's a
very significant change.... Measures of [police
department] performance...include [not only] crime
reduction and victimization reduction [but also]
reduction in fear and reduction in disorder."

Dennis P. Rosenbaum, professor of criminal justice
at the University of Illinois at Chicago, discussed
measuring not only community reaction to police
performance but also the reaction of individuals.
An NIJ-funded project he is directing is "trying to
measure police performance at different levels.
Historically, we've been fairly good at asking
general questions in the community about...how
satisfied they are with the police overall, what
kind of job they are doing, but we're also now
beginning to look more at individual contact
between citizens and officers and how they felt
about that contact, whether it was fair, or how it
was handled."

About the Process of Policing

Stephen D. Mastrofski, professor of criminal
justice at Michigan State University, said that
"both to police officers and the public, what
matters a whole lot is the process of policing as
well as the outcome.... When the crime rate goes
up, police chiefs don't usually lose their jobs.
When fear goes up, they don't usually lose their
jobs. But they can lose their jobs when there is a
riot [or]...a corruption scandal. When you ask the
average citizen why he liked or didn't like some
particular aspect of policing or how do you feel
about the police, time and again they tell you it's
how they were treated. I think that at some point
[in] what matters we have to [include] the kinds of
things the officer on the street and the citizen
can pretty well assess: Was I treated well or
wasn't I? Was I treated with civility, respect? ...
[There's a] whole list of things about the process
that matter tremendously...and is largely absent
from this discussion."

Roger B. Parks, professor in the School of Public
and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University,
also discussed the notion of process, fairness, and
lawfulness. "How people are treated -- these are
really measures that matter.... Police chiefs...do
lose their jobs because of individuals who were
involved in processes with citizens that turn out
very unfortunately.... Police chiefs spend a
tremendous amount of time being concerned about
this and training officers to behave in ways that
are lawful, that are fair, and that are appropriate
in encountering citizens.... It's important to have
some measures of that as what matters because this
is crucial to continuing leadership."

Chief Robert Ford of Port Orange said his
department has examined "what was successful in
increasing citizen satisfaction.... One of things
we found [is that] citizen satisfaction is
extremely highly correlated with police process,
with the officers spending at least 10 or 15
minutes...[going] out and [trying] to do something.
And the citizen always came to the same conclusion:
`I don't care whether you succeeded, but the guy
tries.'"

Stuart Scheingold, professor of political science
at the University of Washington, commented on how
combating disorder may affect police process. "When
you start dealing with disorder, you are intruding
and intervening in people's lives short of any law
violation. It seems to me that at some point it is
at least possible...that the police are engaging
[in] those kinds of behavior that are likely to
create the kind of process concerns...that we have
talked about.... Is this a realistic kind of
problem? Is there...a tension between some crime
attack-disorder attack strategies and process
concerns about fairness and lawfulness?"

Sally T. Hillsman, Deputy Director of NIJ, picked
up on the subject of measuring police process. A
serious question for the group to discuss, she
said, was "whether or not something such as public
trust and confidence is indeed an outcome that we
want to measure directly or whether it's just a
kind of offhand measure of process.... Is access to
police service a process issue that we should
relegate to stuff that we do when we have simply
counted crime and measured...disorder? Or are these
fundamental outcomes that police in their
professional goals really wish to achieve? I think
that is a fundamental discussion and debate. We
could have a list of about six different things....
Is integrity an outcome? Is fairness an outcome?
... If those things are outcomes, then they are
worthy of central measurement questions."

For Mark Moore of the Kennedy School, "It's very
important that many of the things we treat as
process measures be accorded the status and
significance of outcome measures." He makes these
distinctions "within a broad category of process
measures."

1. "Service quality at the level of individual
contacts with citizens."

2. "Responsiveness of the police department to
aggregated community groups."

3. "Lawfulness.... It might not be that there is
any particular constituency 
[for it]...and yet it would be something
that...most of us would be loath to give up and
would like to find some way to measure."

4. Related to lawfulness, "a kind of fairness that
has to do with distributing resources and
protection equally and fairly across the
community...an aggregate characteristic of a police
department that might be important to measure as
well."

5. "The standing of the police department in the
community's eyes as an agency that's available...to
all, that's perceived as operating fairly and
effectively."

About Expectations About the Police

Charles P. Austin, chief, Columbia, South Carolina,
Police Department, discussed people's expectations
of the police. "When we evaluate the service
delivery process and what we expect the outcomes to
be, there are several issues that we take a look at
from the practitioner's standpoint. They include
cultural issues, geographic, social, economic, and
political considerations.... Typically, the people
who place the greatest demands on our resources and
our services do so in situational circumstances so
you can never really get an accurate grasp as to
what is really expected. We will hear one set of
concerns in this room, then go back to our
respective jurisdictions and go into the various
communities and you will hear different sets of
concerns depending on what has happened most
recently. Therein lies the greatest difficulty that
we find ourselves confronting."

Chief Darrel Stephens of St. Petersburg commented,
"In our case, we always have to work with the
neighborhoods in terms of establishing priorities,
and that process...is instructive for both the
police and the people in the communities
because...people in the community [have
expectations of the police] that aren't very real,
and a lot of ideas we have about people in the
community...aren't very real either. That process
of...identifying problems and establishing
priorities is...important to what outcomes actually
turn out to be...."

Jack Greene, professor of criminal justice, Temple
University, noted a "large concern in the public
sector about the quality of service received by two
groups.... There is a user base. Did you get the
service? Was it good? Did it solve your problem?
There are routines that many agencies which are
quality focused on service actually deliver... and
one can measure that in straightforward ways. And
then there are the symbolic components of
government. Whether it makes people feel good,
makes them not feel good; makes them feel safe,
makes them not feel safe...."

In Los Angeles and Philadelphia, two cities where
Greene has done a lot of work, he found that the
concerns of citizens are "either the police don't
show up at all or show up considerably late or very
late, and then when they get there, they're
uncivil.... [And in a lot of cities] there is a
group of populations [largely minority] that feels
that it is underpoliced...[and doesn't] get
services to which [it is] entitled. When that
service does dribble down...it's hostile. So equity
issues...are very much outcomes in this process."

Greene suggested ways to measure these issues. "It
seems to me that one can focus on incidents,
problems, situations which are aggregate
measures...disaggregated to the community level
over time. One could look at user-based calls to
cops, and what do they get once they call them, and
the larger civic base which is what is their
support for city government, and how do the police
contribute to your sense of dependence. All of
those measures are reasonably defined. It's a
question of getting them all together in the same
place, and then there's the huge logistic of
managing that data collection."

Jean Johnson, director of programs, Public Agenda,
said that most people, "unless there's a really
dramatic increase or decrease in crime, [will] not
be measuring effectiveness by your evaluations,
however you design them. They will be measuring
them by individual encounters with police.... Do
the police catch the bad person who did something
terrible, and are they successful in getting them
out of the neighborhood?"

Andrew Benson, reporter, Cleveland Plain Dealer,
noted that "a lot of people have talked here about
community meetings [and] one-on-one interactions
[with the police]. But a lot of people don't have
any contact with police departments.... They get
their perceptions from somewhere else...through the
mass media.... That gets us back to...the old
measures that are very simple, very
alluring...which is the UCR: Crime is up or crime
is down compared to last year, compared to last
month. And that's something that journalists can
get a hold of and run it. That's something
politicians can get a hold of...."

Should We Expect Police Activities to Impact on
Measures of Crime, Disorder, and Fear, and How Will
We Know?

The initial response to the second question in the
day's discussion came from then-Commissioner
William Bratton of New York City, where major
felonies are down 26 percent since he took over the
city's police department 2 years ago. Bratton and
the department have claimed an aggressive share of
the credit for the drop in crime to levels not seen
since the early 1970s.

He first addressed the question by turning it
around. "If we don't expect police activities and
police departments to have an impact on crime,
disorder, and fear, they almost certainly won't,"
Bratton wrote in a paper prepared for the meeting.
"By accepting the prevailing image of police
departments as slow moving and relatively
ineffectual bureaucracies and by assuming that
nothing can be done to change them, we are, in
effect, making a self-fulfilling prophecy. No
organization...is going to achieve high-performance
results in an atmosphere of such low expectations."
The paper says that alternative explanations such
as demographic or economic factors or incarceration
rates cannot account for the drop in the city's
crime rates. The high-performance results he
champions have meant that crime is down citywide in
all 76 precincts between 15 and 40 percent, Bratton
said.

In the discussion the commissioner said that "what
we're engaged in, in New York City, is
results-oriented management. The results I'm
looking for in New York are, quite simply, reduced
crime, reduced quality-of-life negatives such as
disorderly behavior, and, with that, reduced fear.
We reorganized the New York Police Department to
focus on producing those results. Not the 1, 2, 3
percent results that we were seeing in crime
decline in the [early] '90s in New York City but
now the 26 percent in our reduction in crime over
the last 2 years."

He added, "We [the police] can control
crime...within limits and under certain conditions.
In New York City, we were able to do it for a
variety of reasons. One, politically...the
mayor...is very supportive of the issue. Two, the
number of police [38,000] that I have.... Other
factors -- community involvement, community
policing. New York is incredibly a
community-involved city.... It is made up of
hundreds of neighborhoods, and they are involved
politically and involved with police precincts.
They are in the game."

Bratton also addressed researchers and academics:
"The writings of the last several years have raised
a concern on my part that the police were being
discounted as an effective force in our ability to
not only reduce crime where it was high...but to
control it, to keep it at manageable levels....
Increasingly you are completely discounting the
ability of the police and others -- with the
information you are providing -- to make a
difference. In that respect, you're scaring the
hell out of people. There is a sense in this
country now that no matter what we do over the last
5 years of this decade, [we] are going to [have] a
blood bath.... You are doing a disservice to the
public...."

Two other background papers were prepared for the
discussion of the second question, by Alfred
Blumstein, a professor in the H. John Heinz III
School of Public Policy and Management at
Carnegie-Mellon University, and George L. Kelling,
professor of criminal justice at Northeastern
University.

Of Bratton's presentation, Blumstein said,

"The whole theme of the issue that I think Bill
Bratton has caught everyone's attention with is the
basic theme that's sweeping industry of continuous
improvement. One can do [continuous improvement] in
a variety of ways. One can hold one's managers'
feet to the fire based on the outcome measure
you've defined, and the outcome measure certainly
should include...various kinds of crime
measures.... That works in that jurisdiction where
excellent management is in place. One of the
reasons we are all together in Washington under
NIJ's sponsorship is that we really want to develop
a knowledge base and an understanding of the
mechanism that works since what happens in New York
can be applicable to other places beyond a `Do as I
do' kind of repetition."

"We're clearly seeing something in the big cities
that represents a decline in some of the most
serious crime, and the smaller cities are lagging,
in part, I believe as speculation, because of the
lag in the arrival of the drug markets, which I
think were a major factor in the growth of crime in
the late `80s. Drug markets arrived in the smaller
cities 1 to 5 years later. This phenomenon [the
decline of big-city crime rates] may be a
maturation of drug markets, and the maturation will
occur later in the smaller cities."

Kelling saw merit in Bratton's explanation for the
decrease in New York's crime rate. "I believe
something very powerful is happening in New York
City and in some other cities. My own
interpretation...might be the same as Bill's....
[In New York City over the last 20 years] we've
seen the development of a powerful community
movement...really an alternative paradigm to the
criminal justice system paradigm and the law
enforcement paradigm.... There's a movement afoot
to move away from the idea that crime control is
the responsibility of the professionals." Then,
Kelling said, along came a manager, Bratton, "who
suddenly said to the city, `By the way, on top of
your activities...on the top of your
concerns...private security...community crime
control...I am going to energize 38,000 cops and
get them to be pretty active. Under those
conditions I can understand that the police are
having a powerful impact, and that's my
interpretation of what's going on."

Following are excerpts from discussions at the
meeting that focused on Bratton's claim.

Ronald Clarke, dean of the School of Criminal
Justice at Rutgers University, said he was
"actually very glad that Mr. Bratton has taken on
responsibility for reducing crime rates. I think
that the problem with the control and prevention of
crime over the last 15 or 20 years is that nobody
has been willing to take on the responsibility for
reducing crime. There are all kinds of
constituencies that, according to other people,
have the power or the capacity to control crime, or
there are people saying nothing can be done about
it. I think that has lead to a lot of very fuzzy
thinking about causes of crime.... If the police
stand up and say, `We can control crime,' I think
that will provide the leadership that the
community, that society, wants."

But, Clarke said, "I personally doubt...I can't
produce any real evidence...that police action can
have produced such an enormous drop in crime" as
Bratton takes credit for. "Police action can impact
crime in small localized settings if there is a
clear...focus," he added.

Dennis E. Nowicki, chief, Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
North Carolina, Police Department, said of the
causes of the crime decrease in New York, "All the
things that we [not just the police but the
community, other agencies of government, the
business community, and neighborhoods] do are at
play in crime reduction.... Bill's looking at much
more recent information to try to figure out what's
going on, and maybe he needs to look back 10 or 15
years ago to see what went on then" to determine
the behavior of children who now are adults in the
crime-committing age group. "Most of my [crime]
prevention initiatives are targeting
youngsters...and the risk to me is that that's not
going to pay a dividend while I'm around. It's
going to pay a dividend maybe 10 or 15 years down
the line when a Bill Bratton-type comes into
Charlotte and takes credit." (Laughter ensued.)

Nowicki said also that statements that "the police
can't have an effect on crime don't compute with
me.... We overstated for many years the lack of
effect that we have on crime. What you're being
challenged on now is that overstatement. We do have
an effect. But we're not the only ones that have an
effect."

Chief Johnnie Johnson of Birmingham discussed the
impact of moral education on crime rates. "I want
to believe that if the police are operating at 100
percent, we can affect crime.... However, I'm very,
very skeptical about accepting the responsibility
of that impact because what happens when it [crime]
goes up. Do I still say, `Well, I must have
faltered somewhere or my folks have stopped
working. They sit down on me and that's why it has
gone up.' If I work my people at 100 percent, will
that stop [someone's] son from getting out [and]
burglarizing somebody? Will that stop this family
that I know for the last 10 years has produced
criminals to stop producing criminals.... That's a
thing we have to deal with....

"I do have to give credit, though, to Miss Smith
who tells Johnny, `Johnny, you will not steal.
That's wrong.' I can't take that credit from her
because she's having an impact on the crime out
there. I have to give credit to that
minister...that cautions his congregation about
getting involved in crime and use of drugs.... It's
a total community effort that has the most impact
on the occurrence of crime."

Warren Friedman of the Chicago Alliance for
Neighborhood Safety said, "I think the police can
have an effect [on crime], but I have some worries
about that. The kinds of worries come from
experience with community organizations who...have
shut down drug houses, opened up parks, and can do
that with only sporadic support from the police and
usually support which has to do with confrontation
which gets their attention. That's the history of
Chicago up to a short time ago.... I suspect that
now that there's beginnings of partnership between
police and the community in Chicago, that's a much
more powerful tool to shut down targeted areas,
open up parks.... But I also know from the
community experiences that it's very difficult to
sustain. You can win the battle the first time; you
can point at a place where there's no activity, and
you come back 6 months later and it's there. It's
there because the community couldn't stay organized
and sustain their effort and because the police are
very busy and are moving all over the place."

Responding to Bratton's remarks, Chief Robert Ford
of the Port Orange Police Department said, "If you
study the variance between police departments in
crime rates...and if...you group police departments
by census variables, [and] if you take all the
variables [number of police per capita,
demographics, number of people living in a place
over 5 years, numbers of juveniles per thousand
population]...and put them all together, and you
throw them into a beautiful matrix, and you factor
them, and you do some beautiful multiple
correlations, what you have left is still a huge
amount of variance in the crime rates.... I'm
saying that better departments produce better
results."

Edward Flynn, chief, Chelsea, Massachusetts, Police
Department, said, "Somewhere along the line you
guys [researchers and academics] went off track and
we had to keep plunging along in this morass of
crime, disorder, and community deterioration....
What Bill [Bratton's] people have been doing,
which...those academics who do some of this
criminological research could do a wonderful job
of, Bill's people debrief arrested suspects. And
they find things about how the crime occurred. Now
I know factors cause crime, but people commit it.
And if you want to hold police accountable for
diminutions in the crime rate, then I challenge you
to help us find out how crimes are committed...."

Tom Koby, chief of the Boulder, Colorado, Police
Department, said, "I think there is a basic
misunderstanding here about what Bill said.... [He
said] police -- not law enforcement but police in
the sense of the grand tradition of police -- in
partnership with an empowered community can impact
crime and disorder."

Aric Press, a senior writer for Newsweek, noted
that some police officials and agencies now were
taking credit for decreases in crime where,
recently, that was not the practice. Press said,
"The rhetoric, it seems to me, began to change a
few years ago where we were all told that crime was
too big just for the police. The community had to
be involved, that there were all sorts of factors
involved in it. It was beyond the power of the
police to affect directly [crime rates] too much.
Now we have this remarkable success [declining
crime rates in New York City and some other
cities]. The one thing I say to you...is that I
hope that success continues because, if not...if
that's the core business [of policing] -- how many
homicides, how many robberies, how many burglaries
up or down -- what's been said at the table a few
times, about how people don't lose their jobs
because of UCR [Uniform Crime Report] measures,
that's going to change. If that's the way you want
to be measured, that's a tiger you're riding."

Robert H. Langworthy, professor of criminal justice
at the University of Cincinnati, on academic leave
to work with NIJ during 1995-96, said of drops in
crime rates in New York and other cities: "The
dilemma that we are in right now is that we have an
empirical fact in search of an explanation.... It
is an empirical fact that in some cities crime has
gone down. We have a lot of explanations that we
all have been led to at one point or another that
don't seem to allow us to account for that
decline.... One of the problems that we have with
agencies trying to claim success is that they don't
look across the aggregate. We don't know
what...police practices have...experienced a
decline in crime. We don't know what similar police
practices that are being employed in New York City
have been associated with increases in crime. But
we do know...that in at least some places crime has
gone down. We also know that it has gone up in
other places.... And we are thrashing around for an
explanation.... What we have is an empirical fact
and we are searching for an explanation. I think it
is far too premature to presume."

Jack Greene of Temple University said, "Part of the
explanation of New York's experience is...that
crime fell off the plate for about 10 years. We
were all fixing broken windows and broken houses.
We weren't fixing the crime problem that was out
there. And forget all the analytical and
theoretical linkages there. Crime got back on the
agenda. And most police chiefs today use community
policing to talk about crime issues where they
didn't [5 or more years ago]. I think that's an
important shift.... What Bill Bratton's paper does
is get the police back in the lead.... Somebody has
got to be accountable and responsible for at least
keeping this in focus."

Moderator Francis Hartmann asked about developing
"indices that might help the chiefs and...the
researchers."

Jack Greene replied, "I don't think we can lose the
UCR or the victimization surveys or other aggregate
indices of how we are doing in a particular
community. They are baseline information, they have
been collected over a long period of time, and they
are more stable than people give them credit for."
But he added that "there are levels of analysis and
data sets that already exist at several levels that
we do not exploit very well. Calls for service data
[for example]...do not get analyzed very well in a
lot of places.... [h]undreds of thousand of calls
for service...create all kinds of problems and all
kinds of demands for police resources. [So]
aggregate data exist that need to be analyzed in a
different way. Further, there is [a] moral, ethical
kind of value-based assessment that can go on in an
annual or biennial survey of the citizenry. There
are city police departments that print [surveys] on
the back of water bills...a `how-are-we-doing'
questionnaire. That goes, at least, to everybody
who owns a building.... So there are ways to
collect information in fairly unobtrusive ways."

Robert H. Langworthy cited the availability of Law
Enforcement Management and Administrative
Statistics (LEMAS) that are gathered every 3 years
under the auspices of the Bureau of Justice
Statistics. Data on personnel, expenditures and
pay, operations, equipment, computer and
information systems, and policies and programs are
compiled from State and local agencies with 100 or
more officers. "I am a devoted fan of the LEMAS
surveys," Langworthy said. "LEMAS is an incredibly
valuable vehicle for providing information about
policing." Of course, he added, "Any survey of that
sort is going to have a huge number of problems....
But it will get better with age as do all these
enterprises. The problem, though, is that we still
don't build into the process when we design the
LEMAS system...what it is the police are supposed
to be doing that's going to have an impact.... It's
a fairly simple enterprise, I suspect, but it needs
some attention."

------------------------------

Selected NIJ Media Products

Listed below are some recent National Institute of
Justice media products of interest to readers of
"Measuring What Matters." These products are free,
except as indicated, and can be obtained from the
National Criminal Justice Reference Service:
telephone 800-851-3420, e-mail askncjrs@ncjrs.org,
or write NCJRS, Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20849-6000.

The documents also can be downloaded through the
NCJRS Bulletin Board System or at the NCJRS
Anonymous FTP site in ASCII or graphic formats.
They can be viewed online at the Justice
Information Center World Wide Web site. Call NCJRS
for more information. 

Please note that when free publications are out of
stock, they are available as photocopies or through
interlibrary loan.

Blumstein, Alfred, Ph.D., Youth Violence, Guns, and
Illicit Drug Markets, VHS videotape, 1995, NCJ
152235, U.S. $19, Canada and other foreign
countries $24.

Mastrofski, Stephen D., Research Preview, Law
Enforcement in a Time of Community Policing, July
1996, FS 000149.

Roth, Jeffrey A., and Mark H. Moore, Reducing
Violent Crimes and Intentional Injuries, Research
in Action, October 1995, NCJ 156089.

Sampson, Robert, Ph.D., Communities and Crime: A
Study in Chicago, VHS videotape, 1995, NCJ 156924,
U.S. $19, Canada and other foreign countries $24.

Sherman, Lawrence W., Ph.D., Reducing Gun Violence:
Community Policing Against Gun Crime, VHS
videotape, 1995, NCJ 153730, U.S. $19, Canada and
other foreign countries $24.

Skogan, Wesley, Ph.D., Community Policing in
Chicago: Fact or Fiction?, VHS videotape, 1995, NCJ
153273, U.S. $19, Canada and other foreign
countries $24. A summary of the presentation is
available free; ask for FS 000105.

Taylor, Ralph B., and Adele V. Harrell, Physical
Environment and Crime, Research Report, May 1996,
NCJ 157311.

------------------------------

What Indicators Measure Police Performance?
by Jeremy Travis, Director

The police play a central role in our democratic
society. They are called upon to enforce our laws,
to observe constitutional restraint upon the
exercise of governmental power, to answer
individual calls for help, and to respond to
community demands for safety.

Of all governmental operations, the police function
is the most intimate -- the daily, varied
encounters between police officers and individuals,
ranging from routine to traumatic, represent the
most visible and powerful interactions between the
government and the public.

If the police perform their role effectively, our
society benefits immeasurably; if the police
perform their role poorly, the damage to public
confidence and democratic principles can be
irreparable.

How do we know whether the police are doing well?
To encourage discussion, debate, and solid research
on this question, the National Institute of
Justice, in collaboration with the Department of
Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing
Services, convened a Policing Research Institute
discussion entitled "Measuring What Matters." We
decided to bring together, in three 1-day sessions,
about 40 police executives, leading researchers,
community leaders, journalists, and government
officials to discuss the challenges of assessing
police performance.

This report presents highlights of the first
session. In this session, we sought to capture the
national debate that has accompanied the welcome
news of sharp declines in violent crime rates in
some large cities: Can the police claim credit for
this change? What other factors might have 
contributed? How can we examine issues of causation
in contemplating a phenomenon as complex as
criminal behavior?

We confronted another critical issue: What other
indicators should gauge police performance? Fear?
Disorder? Public satisfaction? Public trust and
confidence? If these are additional indicators that
the police are doing well, by what logic do we
hypothesize that the police can affect these more
ephemeral, but equally compelling, indices of
societal well-being?

These questions are being asked at a time of
historic transformation in the way the police are
thinking about themselves. The movement toward
community policing, toward a problem-solving model
of police services, requires a new set of
understandings of the role of the police and, in
turn, a new set of performance measures.

Future sessions of the Policing Research Institute
on "Measuring What Matters" will view these issues
through different prisms. The second session will
look at the police from the outside, examining
public measures of satisfaction as interpreted by
public opinion surveys, press accounts, and
community perceptions. The third will look inward,
examining internal measures of the performance of
individual officers, units of officers, and entire
departments. From all three sessions, we anticipate
making recommendations on new ways of measuring
police performance.

It is our hope that these discussions, the
widespread dissemination of the highlights, and a
future compilation of commissioned papers on these
topics will shed light on the critical police
function at a critical time in our history.

------------------------------

The Decade's Most Important Criminological Insight

"Probably the most important criminological insight
of the decade has been the discovery in a very
systematic fashion of repeat multiple
victimization. This has tremendous implications
both for criminological theory and...practice in
the field. We knew already...of the concentration
of crime in areas.... Take census tracts of the
city and rank order them from low crime to high
crime. That last 15 percent of census tracts
accounts for 40 percent of your total.... You get
this tremendous piling up of crime in places. It
turns out that what appears to cause crime to pile
up very heavily in high crime areas is to a certain
extent because more people are victimized but, more
so, because some people are victimized repeatedly.
They may be commercial establishments, they may be
organizations, they may be individuals, but that
piling up of repeat multiple victimization is
mostly what makes a high-crime neighborhood a
high-crime neighborhood. This drives theory.... The
question is why. ... Why in the same way that a
small percentage of repeat offenders contribute a
large percentage of crime [does] a small percentage
of repeat victims contribute a large percentage of
victimization. ... [it] also drives practice.... So
this notion of finding ways of measuring on the one
hand and, in policy terms, responding to repeat
multiples...is one of the most important kinds of
ideas out there that criminologists have to
contribute to practice."

-- Wesley G. Skogan, professor of political 
science at Northwestern University

------------------------------

The Perversity of the Measures We Use

George L. Kelling, professor of criminal justice at
Northeastern University, lamented "the perversity
of many of the measures that we use in policing.
It's not [only] that they're not just accurate but
that many times they give exactly the wrong
results." 

In his paper prepared for the meeting, Kelling
cited his experience riding with police officers on
bicycle patrol in a densely populated working-class
area. "The trouble is that while some very profound
things are happening in the wards in which I
bicycled, arguably with community officers playing
a pivotal role, officially -- that is, as
represented in departmental records -- these
officers are doing practically nothing. Moreover,
given police traditions, the officers themselves
are bereft of any language to discuss what they are
doing. They still see themselves as responding to,
or managing, incidents, and when probed about what
they are doing or why they are doing it, their
universal response is: `It was only common sense. '
Please do not misread me here. I am not suggesting
that officers are stupid; I am suggesting that the
rhetoric of policing, and the things police count,
are still so tied to the reform, the so-called
`professional,' model of policing that officers
lack a context either to understand or to talk
about what they do or what they accomplish. In the
city that I am reporting on, the officers, the
wards, and the police department suffer from the
inability to count the problems with which officers
deal or the outcomes officers achieve."

------------------------------

The Need for a Big-City Data Base

"Something common is going on in the...big cities.
We really want to know what [it is].... It will be
very desirable...to get timely research results.
That means a data base -- not just the dependent
variable of crime rates -- but where they're
changing, who committing crimes is changing, how
those changes relate to the claim of aggressive
stop-and-frisk interventions, the aggressive minor
offense interventions. Inevitably those
interventions don't happen uniformly across a city
but happen selectively in different places. It
would be very desirable to have those relationships
articulated and explicated and sorted out. In doing
this, we need both aggregation and disaggregation -
- disaggregation by unit, locale, by subgroups
committing the crime, by factors contributing to
it. A major factor in the growth of violence has
been youth violence. A major factor in that has
been the presence of guns resulting from the drug
markets and the diffusion among a lot of young
kids.... We want aggregation by looking across the
big cities and seeing what common trends [exist]."

-- Alfred Blumstein, professor in the H. John Heinz
III School of Pubic Policy and Management,
Carnegie-Mellon University

------------------------------

Making Sense to Voters

"We do need to know not only what matters but what
can be said about what matters in a form that makes
sense not only to policymakers but ultimately to
voting constituents who can easily be swayed by
manipulated misinformation."

-- Edward Flynn, chief, Chelsea, Massachusetts,
Police Department

------------------------------

Measuring What Matters, from City to City

"Measuring what matters. What matters really does
differ from city to city.... I know from my
experience in Boston in the '70s, you lived and
died based on your response time. ... In measuring
what matters, it's...time relevant. In New York
City at this time, what matters in the minds of
people -- the press, the politicians, the public --
are crime rates.... Compounding the dilemma we're
talking about here -- measuring what matters -- is
really, every city in the country has different
concerns at different times."

-- William Bratton, former commissioner, New York
City Police Department

------------------------------

Going Toe-to-Toe with Researchers

"I come to this conference with a healthy
skepticism, quite frankly, about what researchers
and academics can provide us.... I don't see a
lot.... Time has been wasted on some research that
has been done.... We're now educated in the police
field. We have people who can go toe-to-toe with
the researchers in our organizations. It's not
quite so easy to continue to bluff your way by us.
I look forward to having some healthy discussion
about the issue in front of us...."

-- Tom Koby, chief of police, 
Boulder, Colorado

------------------------------

You're the Measuring Device

"I'd like to challenge that. I think you measure
every time you walk out there to talk to your
dispatchers or your officers or your citizens. It's
just that you're the measuring device.... You could
take us a long way in this discussion if you would
talk to us about what matters to you in those
conversations. What are you listening for? What do
you want to know from those people.... All of the
key actors in the police community relationship
need to come forward, sit down, and talk about what
matters to them...."

-- Mary Ann Wycoff, senior research associate at
the Police Executive Research Forum, in response to
Chief Tom Koby of the Boulder, Colorado, Police
Department, who told the meeting he did not spend a
lot of time measuring.

------------------------------

Matters of Measure: About Macro to Micro

"Much of our difficulty in measurement stems from
our effort to constantly use global,
all-encompassing terms -- the trinity of crime,
disorder, and fear -- which for me has no greater
meaning than disease, illness, and the associated
anxieties. We need desperately...to move from the
macro to the micro in every possible way. I was
pleased to see [in some papers prepared for the
meeting] a substantial effort to move along those
lines with references to discrete problems and to
local measures. That's what the community is
concerned about -- local measures. That's what the
chiefs are concerned about...local problems,
specifically defined problems where you can develop
targeted responses and, as a result, increase
substantially the potential for measuring the
actual impact. One of the side benefits is that we
move away from...trying to measure attitudes and
perceptions to measure specific behavior and
specific outcome."

-- Herman Goldstein, law professor at the
University of Wisconsin

------------------------------

Matters of Measure: About Racial Tensions

In discussing measurement, Herman Goldstein said to
keep in mind that, "Today...in policing, the bottom
line is not crime, the bottom line is the racial
tensions in our large urban areas, and there's no
escaping that. We may, in fact, have an impact upon
crime, disorder, and fear, but if, in the course of
doing that, we substantially increase tensions in
the community, we've made matters worse. It
suggests to me that we need to move more
aggressively in monitoring and evaluation to take
the vital signs of the community...to reflect on
what the impact is of different [police] strategies
and practices that we adopt."

------------------------------

Matters of Measure: About Police-Crafted
Measurements

Herman Goldstein cited the measurement efforts of
police practitioners "in dealing with problems on
the street. They learn from the bottom up. For
example, officers in San Diego who confronted the
classic long-term problem of street prostitution
came up with some incredibly innovative measures of
their impact, of how much business the hotels were
doing, how many hours stores were keeping open, how
much they were investing in security. These
[measures] admittedly are amateurish, they're baby
steps, and they tend to invite dismissal and
disdain...because they don't meet all of the
standards. But they are very significant. These
officers are uninhibited by all kinds of concerns
that we have.... They ask the right questions, and
we have a lot to learn from them. I think there is
a way to capture that common sense...."

------------------------------

Indicators That Say "Try Again"

"We can't spend the money that is needed for
detailed, deep evaluations on every innovative idea
people may have. But we need to have indicators at
some minor level that say, `Try again, try again.
Good idea. Look at it some more.' We always will be
looking for simple, aggregate measures and then
look at some things in detail and be able to move
between them. I hope this session and the ones that
follow will begin to give us a way to find links so
that academic researchers can start to see how can
we take these measures and find proxies that any
community can afford to produce. And practitioners
can begin to see that it is really important to
understand what measures are developed and not be
the passive recipient."

-- Patricia Brantingham, professor of criminology,
Simon Fraser University

------------------------------

Papers prepared for this and the other Policing
Research Institute meetings are scheduled to be
published in book-length form by NIJ after the
third session. 

------------------------------

Data Sources

Following are data sources mentioned in this
report.

Uniform Crime Reports (UCR): An annual statistical
summary, collected and published by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, of crimes reported to the
police. The UCR contains detailed information on
Part I, or serious, offenses: criminal homicide,
forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault,
burglary, larceny, car theft, and arson.

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): Surveys
a large sample of U.S. residents to determine
annual victimization rates of all Part I crimes
except homicide and arson. The NCVS sample,
prepared for the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
consists of about 50,000 households and 101,000
persons who are interviewed every 6 months for 5
years.

Law Enforcement Management and Administrative
Statistics (LEMAS): Data collected from State and
local agencies with 100 or more officers on
personnel matters, expenditures and pay,
operations, equipment, computer and information
systems, and policies and programs. LEMAS is
compiled about every 3 years under the auspices of
the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

------------------------------

Participants in the Policing Research Institute
Meeting, November 28, 1995, Washington D.C.

Geoffrey P. Alpert
Professor of Criminology
School of Criminal Justice
University of South Carolina

Charles P. Austin
Chief of Police
Columbia, South Carolina, Police Department

Andrew Benson
Reporter
Cleveland Plain Dealer

Alfred Blumstein
J. Erik Jonsson University Professor
H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and
Management
Carnegie-Mellon University

Joseph E. Brann
Director
Community Oriented Policing Services
U.S. Department of Justice

Patricia Brantingham
Professor
School of Criminology
Simon Fraser University

William Bratton
Police Commissioner
New York City Police Department

Michael E. Clark
President
Citizens Committee for New York City

Ronald Clarke
Dean
School of Criminal Justice
Rutgers University

Bennie Click
Chief of Police
Dallas, Texas, Police Department

David Duffee
Dean
School of Criminal Justice
State University of New York at Albany

Michael J. Farrell
Deputy Commissioner
Policy and Planning
New York City Police Department

Edward Flynn
Chief of Police
Chelsea, Massachusetts, Police Department

Robert Ford
Chief of Police
Port Orange, Florida, Police Department

Warren Friedman
Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety

Herman Goldstein
Professor
School of Law
University of Wisconsin

Jack Greene
Professor
Department of Criminal Justice
Temple University

Clarence Harmon
Chief of Police
St. Louis, Missouri, Police Department

Francis X. Hartmann
Executive Director
Programs in Criminal Justice Policy and Management
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

Sally T. Hillsman
Deputy Director
Office of Research and Evaluation 
National Institute of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice

Jean Johnson
Director of Programs
Public Agenda

Johnnie Johnson
Chief of Police
Birmingham, Alabama, Police Department

George L. Kelling
Professor
College of Criminal Justice
Northeastern University

Carl B. Klockars
Professor
Division of Criminal Justice
University of Delaware

Tom Koby
Chief of Police
Boulder, Colorado, Police Department

Robert H. Langworthy
Professor of Criminal Justice
University of Cincinnati
Program Manager (former)
Office of Research and Evaluation
National Institute of Justice

Peter K. Manning
Professor
School of Criminal Justice
Michigan State University

Stephen D. Mastrofski
Associate Professor
Administration of Justice
Pennsylvania State University

Phyllis McDonald
Social Science Analyst
National Institute of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice

Mark H. Moore
Professor
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

Dennis E. Nowicki
Chief of Police
Law Enforcement Center
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Police
Department

Roger B. Parks
Professor
School of Public and Environmental Affairs
Indiana University

Aric Press
Senior Writer
Newsweek

Dennis P. Rosenbaum
Professor
Department of Criminal Justice
University of Illinois at Chicago

Robert Sampson
Professor
Department of Sociology
University of Chicago

Stuart Scheingold
Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Washington

Wesley G. Skogan
Professor
Department of Political Science
Center for Urban Affairs
Northwestern University

Darrel W. Stephens
Chief of Police
St. Petersburg, Florida, Police Department

Ralph Taylor
Professor
Criminal Justice Department
Temple University

Jeremy Travis
Director
National Institute of Justice

Benjamin B. Tucker
Deputy Director for Operations
Community Oriented Policing Services
U.S. Department of Justice

David Williams
Assistant Chief
Portland, Oregon, Police Department

Gerald Williams
Director
Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute
Sam Houston State University

Jane Wiseman
Assistant to the Director for Strategic Planning   
National Institute of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice

Mary Ann Wycoff
Senior Research Associate
Police Executive Research Forum

------------------------------

Discussion Themes

Several themes emerged in the discussions that are
covered in this report. They had to do with
communities, the reduction in big-city crime rates,
the process of policing, and expectations about the
police.

Communities. At least four themes about communities
were heard:

o The importance of measuring neighborhoods, the
small geographic units that make up cities, to
understand the impact of police endeavors. "You've
got to build from the neighborhood up," said one
participant.

o The political, cultural, and social realities of
communities and the larger economic and other
forces that form them. These matters are often not
considered or measured in evaluating the police in
their interaction with communities.

o The need of communities to be involved in
resolving their problems, notably disorder.
Communities are "absolutely critical to making
safer neighborhoods," said a participant.

o The difficulties police have in addressing the
needs within communities.

The decline in big-city crime rates. A major topic
in the day's discussions centered on explanations
for the significant decline in crime rates in many
large U.S. cities. The explanations included (1)
aggressive, results-oriented management of police
departments, (2) a maturation of big-city drug
markets that means less violence, and (3) the
coordinated efforts of communities, the police, and
other agencies of government in crime prevention.

The process of policing. How the police behave --
how they act toward citizens -- in carrying out
their jobs was a recurring theme during the
meeting. "Both to police officers and the public,
what matters a whole lot is the process of policing
as well as the outcomes," according to a
participant. "Citizen satisfaction is extremely
highly correlated with police process," with police
officers attempting to resolve the concerns of
citizens, said a police chief. As to measuring the
police, "process measures [should] be accorded the
status and significance of outcome measures,"
according to an academic researcher.

Expectations about the police. What the public
expects from the police was another frequently
voiced theme. Public concerns depend "on what has
happened most recently," a police chief said. A
professor of criminal justice noted two aspects to
citizens' expectations: Did users of police
services get the service they expected, and did it
solve their problem? Did users of police services
feel more or less safe, better or worse, as a
result of interaction with the police? A public
opinion researcher suggested that most people
measure the police by their individual encounters
with them. A journalist said many people's
expectations and opinions of police come from mass
media reports of daily crimes.

------------------------------

Thomas V. Brady is a Washington, D.C.-based writer
and editor specializing in criminal and civil
justice matters.

Findings and conclusions reported here are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official position or policies of the U.S.
Department of Justice.

The National Institute of Justice is a component of
the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes
the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims
of Crime.

NCJ 162205