Worth a Look: Did Performance Measurement Cause America’s Police Problem?
Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene recently published an interesting article in Governing titled Did Performance Measurement Cause America’s Police Problem?
The article is definitely worth a few minutes to read.
Sparrow points out that the two most commonly used measures of police work — crime reduction and enforcement productivity “fail to reflect the very best performance in crime control.” Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene
The assumptions in the piece are not necessarily new. Most of the recent material published in the last several years that discusses performance metrics for law enforcement recognize that the traditional measures (crime rates, arrest numbers, case clearances, response times, etc.) are not effective. Community policing, especially given the current environment, dictates that agencies have to look toward the community itself to measure successes and failures (much like the business world, imagine that).
My personal favorite peeve is crime numbers. Chasing figures that are usually hard to actually impact, much less explain, can make an agency a slave to those numbers. I’ve always associated it with the same madness of Don Quixote running down windmills. The noblest of intentions, the foolhardy belief that the quest is real.
If you brag on those bad boys when they are low, be ready to eat some crow when they roll back up again, because we all know they will. Granted we are stuck with them, but they don’t have to become the rule.
Looking toward the community as a measurement is not easy; it is qualitative, not quantitative. There is no one-stop tool; every individual method will have challenges and limitations, so the goal should be to use as many as possible. Most importantly though is to operate everyday as though you are being being measured and scored, because even though you may not have numbers in front or you, you are.
What metrics and measurements are the best in your opinion?
© 2015 DAVID A. LYONS
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Andrew Richards
When police departments were initially formed, constables interacted with the public constantly. Crimes were not as intense as they are today in some communities. The idea that there is a murder or two every day is staggering, and so are the expectations of the public on police to solve each one, even when the shooter is driving past the scene at 30 mph. Crime prevention has been one of those invisible tools, you just don’t ever really know if you are hitting the nail on the head or if you had a close miss. PD’s do not generally have the budget ability to fully fund prevention or community efforts even if when they want to. Giving an officer time or overtime to interact with the community takes away from funding detectives, crime solving or additional response patrol. Some officers are better than others at interaction with the community between calls (thereby no additional funding). And now we see departments/officers stepping back on arrests, and at this point who can blame them. The proverbial “hanging tree” is now hanging the sheriff and his pose. So crimes will be up and arrests will be down. Good luck with those performance measurements.
I think the question of police performance measures is confusing because we haven’t first identified the purpose of a police force. If the purpose is to catch bad guys, then arrests and ticket counts may be completely valid means of measurement of the effectiveness of a police force. If the purpose is to ensure a safe community, then measuring the safety of the community would seem to be a more valid measure. The number of arrests would not be a measurement of the safety of a community. If we accept Peel’s Ninth Principle of Policing, then we should be looking at crime rates.
I don’t think that I am going out on much a of a limb here when I say that I believe that very few, if any, police forces have put their minds to clearly articulating their purpose. Why does a city have a police force? What exactly is a police force expected to be achieving? I think that if your city council was asked what the purpose of their police force was, they would also struggle to answer it.
It appears that in the vast majority of cases, if not all, we have city council which has a very large part of their budget going to the police force, but they don’t have a clearly articulated purpose behind that police force. At the same time that police force is very busy, and some officers are being injured and others losing their lives in that busyness, as they work for an unstated purpose. With no commonly understood purpose, and no clearly articulated goals and measures of success, you will end up with police officers focusing on different things, behaving very differently, and everyone being frustrated because nobody has told the other person what they think the purpose is and what their goal is.
The problem is not the measurements being used. The problem is in not knowing the purpose of the police service, and not knowing what we are to be doing to align with that purpose.
Quoting from a comment on the original article: “Quantitative = Outputs. Qualitative = Outcomes.” I can’t say it any better so I simply quoted it. If you are measuring how many arrests someone made, tickets given etc, you are determining how busy they are. Instead you need to be measuring the outcomes of the actions taken. I am in favor of catching the bad guys, and really enjoyed doing it, but simply catching bad guys may not be very effective at our ultimate goal.
The public perception quandary police find themselves in today- ambitious defender, or over zealous abuser, is partly due to the use of police as pawns of the political elite. Officers for the most part follow service options offered from the police culture they inherit. When police management prioritized enforcement, we escalated arrests, if service became the vogue, we pamper citizens. Even when both are deemed priorities, one usually overtakes the other in practice. Police themselves then. must regain control of operational priorities and approaches through best practices demonstrated by acceptable results for both police and the communities they serve. The perpetual war for authoritative decision making is not so much against the public, as politically appointed management seeking to please it’s masters. The police are the public and have shared interests in safety and community building. We need only to make that realization and resist becoming victims of policies that do not support our professional responsibilities.
This is a discussion that must be held. We know there are so many variables in our society that law enforcement has absolutely no control over such as job availability, a quality education, or the economy in general. But those issues have a huge impact on our overall society, local community and crime.
Then there is a disconnect between the elements of criminal justice system- enforcement, prosecution and jails/prisons. We are entirely too reactive with each element having different goals and rarely working in concert.
It is disappointing how little the average city council, county or state government knows about law enforcement and they are absolutely not interested in learning.
Data collection is critical to measure the use of a law enforcement officer’s time and its impact on outcomes. But merely counting arrests or citations improves nothing. Far too often there is no analysis or discussion about what our customers (the citizens) want from law enforcement. Reports are written but there is no follow up to ensure resolution of the fundamental problem that generated the call. We are off to the next call where we measure response times, number of reports taken, arrests, etc.
Core values and mission statements are essential to properly define the outcomes we want. There are many good ones. Ours is Professionalism (professional in appearence, actions and attitude), Committment to Outstanding Service (Provide outstanding service at each encounter), and Proactive Problem Solving (Always proactive with a commitment to problem solving).
Effective law enforcement is absolutely critical to a stable society but we cannot achieve desired outcomes alone. Working in concert with the other elements of the justice system, local elected leaders and citizens we can better define our mission and sharpen our focus on the type and quality of services needed.
Let’s start at the beginning, when law enforcement officers resided in their communities and participated in the activities of the community we learned the different values within that community and the in turn learned the values of the officers. Within my long service within the criminal justice system I have seen administrators use traffic as the focal point of political support for raising funds. I have further seen administrators knock down officers, had the ability and contacts to work the crimes and succeed in solving them given the time and resources. Maybe the problem is not with the officers, but with administrators, who are so afraid of losing political favor. Numbers can never be the true factor due to police departments reclassifying crimes to suit their administrative agenda
to prove their doing their job to the political fraction.
The bottom line law enforcement must become connected to all of the communities they serve. And law enforcement officers must present themselves to be trustworthy & honest in their approach to doing their service to the communities they serve.
It is a useless metric. The only real way to measure success is to be able to record the true number of crimes NOT committed, and that is pretty much impossible.
Being a retired Chief of a small police department I have never believed in measuring officers’ performance or the department’s success by comparing statistics (arrests, tickets, crimes, etc.). I believe it is weak and ineffective supervision and management. One of the first things I did when I was appointed Chief was eliminate a “point system” that had been in place and when I explained to the troops what our goals were they performed in outstanding fashion. Unfortunately the uninformed politicians, media and the public don’t understand the issues, or the time required to see results and they continue to use statistics as the main method of evaluating personnel and organizations as a whole.
Having said that, many Chiefs are in a “no-win” situation because they must show “success” and be able to justify their officers’ wages and benefits as well as the organization’s staffing levels – not an envious position to be in. My personal method of operating is to use some of these statistics as a guide, but advise the governmental officials that the real gauge of success is evaluating the level of fear (or lack of) in a community and the “approachability” of the police department by the public – both of which are intangible and qualitative in nature. Unfortunately many of the strategies and tactics that law enforcement uses to reduce “fear” and crime (stop and frisk, targeted enforcement, etc.) is not very popular right now and the level of trust in law enforcement is lacking because of a couple of clearly bad incidents (although most of the recent incidents covered by the biased media involved appropriate actions by the police – just not popular). If the tactics and qualitative evaluation methods law enforcement utilizes to measure success is not acceptable to the governing politicians or the community itself then a chief must make a decision as to his/her tenure in that jurisdiction. Education in these topics could go a long way to changing things.
James Barth
Good article David.
Ernest DeLong
Measuring police performance or police effectiveness in city, county, or state police departments using statistics is indeed a one-sided, exacerbating and often frustrating effort. Stats go up and down in all categories over a period of years as the “measurements” taken bear out. I agree that our current measurements are a part of the picture, but certainly there is something left to be desired, a community effectiveness or public trust or some other qualitative measure that meshes the data instead of just crunching the numbers.
Stats alone and being on a department that is “stat” driven is frustrating and a morale killer often leading to enforcement efforts and command staff demanding more of officers which results in the gathering of more stats. Indeed, officers on the street feel like they are constantly trying to hit a moving target, chasing their own tails, being pushed and pushed and of course never being appreciated for the positive citizen contacts that happen on a daily basis but are not measured.
Policing in America will undergo more changes as it has in the past, more cameras, more documentation, more mistrust of officers on the street. Guess we can all agree that some measurements need to be taken, some statistics are important, but can effectiveness and community trust be truly and accurately measured?
Kevin Yeates
I think the question of police performance measures is confusing because we haven’t first identified the purpose of a police force. If the purpose is to catch bad guys, then arrests and ticket counts may be completely valid means of measurement of the effectiveness of a police force. If the purpose is to ensure a safe community, then measuring the safety of the community would seem to be a more valid measure. The number of arrests would not be a measurement of the safety of a community. If we accept Peel’s Ninth Principle of Policing, then we should be looking at crime rates.
I don’t think that I am going out on much a of a limb here when I say that I believe that very few, if any, police forces have put their minds to clearly articulating their purpose. Why does a city have a police force? What exactly is a police force expected to be achieving? I think that if your city council was asked what the purpose of their police force was, they would also struggle to answer it.
It appears that in the vast majority of cases, if not all, we have city council which has a very large part of their budget going to the police force, but they don’t have a clearly articulated purpose behind that police force. At the same time that police force is very busy, and some officers are being injured and others losing their lives in that busyness, as they work for an unstated purpose. With no commonly understood purpose, and no clearly articulated goals and measures of success, you will end up with police officers focusing on different things, behaving very differently, and everyone being frustrated because nobody has told the other person what they think the purpose is and what their goal is.
The problem is not the measurements being used. The problem is in not knowing the purpose of the police service, and not knowing what we are to be doing to align with that purpose.
Doug “Red” Parker
Kevin, I agree. One reason “community policing” has failed to take root is because these practices lack traditional performance metrics. Over the past decades the public have been fed crime statistics as reflections of police effectiveness (when crime retreats) and police needs (when it advances). This type of thinking also leads to the “I am not a social worker” attitude reflected by too many police officers. If their performance isn’t directly tied to quantifiable results, it isn’t worth doing.
Peel’s Principles still apply, but collectively. Distilling them reveals the core truth about building and sustaining trust, based on the idea of social contract: the police are the public and the public are the police.
Dan Young
Very interesting, thank you for sharing.