Question

Keeping in mind the concepts of reliability and validity, develop a list of suitable performance indicators for police personnel (in Ontario Canada) working in the following areas and identify strengths and weaknesses of each:

• Patrol Function
• Community Relations
• Communications Centre
• Crime Prevention
• Police Administration
• Fleet Maintenance

Answer 1

Patrol Function: Following measures for indicating the patrolling function.

• Presence (the mean street time spent by patrolling officer to their standard time)
• Attentive
• Competent (know how to handle deviants)
• Professional and fair behavior

Strengths and weaknesses: It will measure their performance as judged by people’s satisfaction and confidence in police. It is not very objective as most are subjective items.

Community Relations:

• Community platforms: Community meetings by police
• Community opinion on trust on police (through maintaining security, safety, racial equality and civil order in public areas).
• Satisfaction of customer: through reduction in crime rates (homicide, home burglary, child abduction, drunk drivers etc.)

Strengths and weaknesses: It captures the confidence the citizens have on the police. But it can be manipulated in published data.

Communications Center:

• The size of workforce to respond to 911 calls
• Standards time for responding to different calls

Strengths and weaknesses: This is very objective as based on quantitative data. But the competency of personnel is not judged by it.

Crime Prevention:

• Warning arrangements
• Crime solving rate      
• Number of investigation on unauthorized fire guns

Strengths and weaknesses: This is very objective as based on quantitative data. But it ignores complexity of case.

Police Administration

• Resource utilization: no. of officers allocated active crime duty area wise that results in using public funds economically (by efficient allocation of officers to areas and type of duties)
• Training of officers: Percentage of officers sent for it.
• Mean time in crime reporting and conviction.
• Use of force in fair manner (shoot only when needed)
• Transparency: accuracy in published data of their service outputs.

Fleet Maintenance: It measures their effective and economic deployment of police personnel.

• Cost per hour of a police personnel in comparison to established standards.

• Rate of optimum utilization of police personnel: how long they provide service in comparison to their capacities.

Strengths and weaknesses: This is very objective as based on quantitative data but it can vary according to the sample as quality of police supervisor doing the allocation will vary.

The above indicators are used by US Department of Justice. Most of them are developed by Harvard criminologists Mark Moore, Anthony Braga and others that ensures their face and content validity and reliability.