Please make sure to review the materials for this Module before addressing issues pertaining to the measurement of police performance. For this weeks discussion we have a very

New Perspectives in Policing

Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety This is one in a series of papers that will be published as a result of the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety.

Harvard’s Executive Sessions are a convening of individuals of independent standing who take joint responsibility for rethinking and improving society’s responses to an issue. Members are selected based on their experiences, their reputation for thoughtfulness and their potential for helping to disseminate the work of the Session.

In the early 1980s, an Executive Session on Policing helped resolve many law enforcement issues of the day. It produced a number of papers and concepts that revolutionized policing. Thirty years later, law enforcement has changed and NIJ and the Harvard Kennedy School are again collaborating to help resolve law enforcement issues of the day.

Learn more about the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety at:

www.NIJ.gov, keywords “Executive Session Policing”

www.hks.harvard.edu, keywords “Executive Session Policing”

VE RI TAS HARVARD Kennedy School Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management National Institute of Justice

M A R C H 2 0 1 5

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization Malcolm K. Sparrow

Introduction

Perhaps everything the modern police executive

needs to know about performance measurement

has already been written. But much of the best

work on the subject is both voluminous and now

more than a decade old, so there is no guarantee

that today’s police executives have read it. Indeed, it

appears that many police organizations have not yet

taken some of its most important lessons to heart.

I hope, in this paper, to offer police executives

some broad frameworks for recognizing the

value of police work, to point out some common

mistakes regarding performance measurement,

and to draw police executives’ attention to key

pieces of literature that they might not have

explored and may find useful. I also hope to

bring to the police profession some of the general

lessons learned in other security and regulatory

professions about the special challenges of

performance measurement in a risk-control or

harm-reduction setting.

A research project entitled “Measuring What

Matters,” funded jointly by the National Institute

of Justice (NIJ) and the Office of Community

Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office), led

2 | New Perspectives in Policing

to the publication in July 1999 of a substantial

collection of essays on the subject of measuring

performance.1 The 15 essays that make up that

collection are fascinating, not least for the

divergence of opinion they reveal among the

experts of the day. The sharpest disagreements

pit the champions of the New York Police

Department’s (NYPD’s) early CompStat model

(with its rigorous and almost single-minded

focus on reductions in reported crime as the

“bottom line” of policing) against a broad range

of scholars who mostly espoused more expansive

conceptions of the policing mission and pressed

the case for more inclusive and more nuanced

approaches to performance measurement.

Three years later, in 2002, the Police Executive

Research Forum (PERF) published another

major report on performance measurement,

Recognizing Value in Policing: The Challenge

of Recognizing Police Performance, authored

principally by Mark H. Moore.2 PERF followed

that up in 2003 with a condensed document, The

“Bottom Line” of Policing: What Citizens Should

Value (and Measure!) in Police Performance,3

authored by Moore and Anthony Braga.

Despite the richness of the frameworks presented

in these and other materials, a significant

proportion of today’s police organizations

seem to remain narrowly focused on the same

categories of indicators that have dominated the

field for decades:

(a) Reductions in the number of serious crimes

reported, most commonly presented as

local comparisons against an immediately

preceding time period.

(b) Clearance rates.

(c) Response times.

(d) Measures of enforcement productivity (e.g.,

numbers of arrests, citations or stop-and-frisk

searches).

Cite this paper as: Sparrow, Malcolm K. Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization. New Perspectives in Policing Bulletin. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 2015. NCJ 248476.

A few departments now use citizen satisfaction

surveys on a regular basis, but most do not.

Clearance rates are generally difficult to measure

in a standardized and objective fashion, so

category (b) tends to receive less emphasis than

the other three. Categories (c) and (d) — response

times and enforcement productivity metrics —

are useful in showing that police are getting to

calls fast and working hard but reveal nothing

about whether they are working intelligently,

using appropriate methods or having a positive

impact.

Therefore, category (a) — reductions in the

number of serious crime reports — tends to

dominate many departments’ internal and

external claims of success, being the closest

thing available to a genuine crime-control

outcome measure. These measures have retained

their prominence despite everything the field is

supposed to have learned in the last 20 years

about the limitations of reported crime statistics.

Those limitations (which this paper will explore in

greater detail later) include the following:

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 3

(1) The focus is narrow because crime control is just

one of several components of the police mission.

(2) The focus on serious crimes is narrower still, as

community concerns often revolve around other

problems and patterns of behavior.

(3) Relentless pressure to lower the numbers,

without equivalent pressure to preserve the

integrity of the recording and reporting systems,

invites manipulation of crime statistics —

suppression of reports and misclassification of

crimes — and other forms of corruption.

(4) Focusing on reported crime overlooks

unreported crimes. Overall levels of

victimization are generally two to three times

higher than reported crime rates.4 Particularly

low reporting rates apply to household thefts,

rape, other sexual assaults, crimes against

youths ages 12 to 17, violent crimes committed

at schools, and crimes committed by someone

the victim knows well.5

(5) P r e s s u r e t o r e d u c e t h e n u m b e r s i s

counterproductive when dealing with invisible

crimes (classically unreported or underreported

crimes, such as crimes within the family, white

collar crimes, consensual crimes such as

drug dealing or bribery, and crimes involving

intimidation). Successful campaigns against

these types of crime often involve deliberate

attempts to expose the problem by first driving

reporting rates up, not down.6

(6) A focus on crime rate reductions does not

consider the costs or side effects of the strategies

used to achieve them.

(7) Emphasizing comparisons with prior time

periods affords a short-term and very local

perspective. It may give a department the

chance to boast, even while its crime rates

remain abysmal compared with other

jurisdictions. Conversely, best performers (with

low crime rates overall) might look bad when

random fluctuations on a quarterly or annual

basis raise their numbers. Genuine longer term

trends may be masked by temporary changes,

such as those caused by weather patterns or

special events. More important than local

short-term fluctuations are sustained longer

term trends and comparisons with crime rates

in similar communities. Pressure to beat one’s

own performance, year after year, can produce

bizarre and perverse incentives.

(8) Even if crime levels were once out of control,

the reductions achievable will inevitably run

out eventually, when rates plateau at more

acceptable levels. At this point, the department’s

normal crime-control success story — assuming

that reductions in reported crime rates had been

its heart and soul — evaporates. Some executives

fail to recognize the point at which legitimate

reductions have been exhausted. Continuing to

demand reductions at that point is like failing to

set the torque control on a power screwdriver:

first you drive the screw, which is useful work;

but then you rip everything to shreds and even

undo the value of your initial tightening. The

same performance focus that initially produced

legitimate gains becomes a destructive force if

pressed too hard or for too long.

4 | New Perspectives in Policing

(9) A number is just a number, and reliance on it

reduces all the complexity of real life to a zero

or a one. One special crime, or one particular

crime unsolved, may have a disproportionate

impact on a community’s sense of safety and

security. Aggregate numbers fail to capture

the significance of special cases.

Reported crime rates will always belong among

the suite of indicators relevant for managing a

complex police department, as will response

times, clearance rates, enforcement productivity,

community satisfaction and indicators of morale.

But what will happen if police executives stress

one or another of these to the virtual exclusion of

all else? What will happen if relentless pressure

is applied to lower the reported crime rate, but

no counterbalancing controls are imposed on

methods, the use of force, or the integrity of

the recording and reporting systems? From the

public’s perspective, the resulting organizational

behaviors can be ineffective, inappropriate and

even disastrous.

If we acknowledged the limitations of reported

crime rates and managed to lessen our

dependence on them, then how would we

recognize true success in crime control? And how

might we better capture and describe it?

I believe the answer is the same across the

f u l l ra nge of gover nment’s r isk-cont rol

responsibilities, whether the harms to be

controlled are criminal victimization, pollution,

corruption, fraud, tax evasion, terrorism or other

potential and actual harms. The definition of

success in risk control or harm reduction is to

spot emerging problems early and suppress them

before they do much harm.7 This is a very different

idea from “allow problems to grow so hopelessly

out of control that we can then get serious, all of a

sudden, and produce substantial reductions year

after year after year.”

What do citizens expect of government agencies

entrusted with crime control, risk control, or

other harm-reduction duties? The public does not

expect that governments will be able to prevent

all crimes or contain all harms. But they do

expect government agencies to provide the best

protection possible, and at a reasonable price, by

being:

(a) Vigilant, so they can spot emerging threats

early, pick up on precursors and warning

signs, use their imaginations to work out what

could happen, use their intelligence systems

to discover what others are planning, and do

all this before much harm is done.

(b) Nimble, flexible enough to organize

themselves quickly and appropriately around

each emerging crime pattern rather than

being locked into routines and processes

designed for traditional issues.

(c) Skillful, masters of the entire intervention

toolkit, experienced (as craftsmen) in

picking the best tools for each task, and

adept at inventing new approaches when

existing methods turn out to be irrelevant or

insufficient to suppress an emerging threat.8

Real success in crime control — spotting

emerging crime problems early and suppressing

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 5

them before they do much harm — would not

produce substantial year-to-year reductions in

crime figures because genuine and substantial

reductions are available only when crime

problems have first grown out of control. Neither

would best practices produce enormous numbers

of arrests, coercive interventions or any other

specific activity because skill demands economy

in the use of force and financial resources and

rests on artful and well-tailored responses rather

than extensive and costly campaigns.

Ironically, therefore, the two classes of metrics

that still seem to wield the most influence in

many departments — crime reduction and

enforcement productivity — would utterly fail to

reflect the very best performance in crime control.

Furthermore, we must take seriously the fact

that other important duties of the police will

never be captured through crime statistics or

in measures of enforcement output. As NYPD

Assistant Commissioner Ronald J. Wilhelmy

wrote in a November 2013 internal NYPD strategy

document:

[W]e cannot continue to evaluate

personnel on the simple measure of

whether crime is up or down relative to a

prior period. Most importantly, CompStat

has ignored measurement of other core

functions. Chiefly, we fail to measure

what may be our highest priority: public

satisfaction. We also fail to measure

quality of life, integrity, community

relations, administrative efficiency, and

employee satisfaction, to name just a few

other important areas.9

Who Is Flying This Airplane, and What Kind of Training Have They Had?

At the most recent meeting of the Executive

Session, we asked the police chiefs present, “Do

you think your police department is more or less

complicated than a Boeing 737?” (see photograph

of Boeing 737 cockpit). They all concluded fairly

quickly that they considered their departments

more complicated and put forward various

reasons.

First, their departments were made up mostly of

people, whom they regarded as more complex

and difficult to manage than the electrical,

mechanical, hydraulic and software systems that

make up a modern commercial jetliner.

Second, they felt their departments’ missions

were multiple and ambiguous, rather than single

and clear. Picking Denver as a prototypical flight

destination, they wondered aloud, “What’s the

equivalent of Denver for my police department?”

Given a destination, flight paths can be mapped

out in advance and scheduled within a minute,

even across the globe. Unless something strange

or unusual happens along the way, the airline pilot

(and most likely an autopilot) follows the plan. For

police agencies, “strange and unusual” is normal.

Unexpected events happen all the time, often

shifting a department’s priorities and course. As

a routine matter, different constituencies have

different priorities, obliging police executives to

juggle conflicting and sometimes irreconcilable

demands.

6 | New Perspectives in Policing

Photograph of Boeing 737 Cockpit Source: Photograph by Christiaan van Heijst, www.jpcvanheijst.com, used with permission.

Assuming that for these or other reasons, the

answer is “more complicated,” then we might

want to know how the training and practices

of police executives compare with those of

commercial pilots when it comes to using

information in managing their enterprise.

The pilot of a Boeing 737 has access to at least 50

types of information on a continuing basis. Not

all of them require constant monitoring, as some

of the instruments in the cockpit beep or squeak

or flash when they need attention. At least 10 to

12 types of information are monitored constantly.

What do we expect of pilots? That they know,

through their training, how to combine different

types of information and interpret them in

context, so they can quickly recognize important

conditions of the plane and of the environment

and know how they should respond.

A simple question like, “Am I in danger of

stalling?” (i.e., flying too slowly to retain control

of the aircraft) requires at least seven types of

information to resolve: altitude, air temperature,

windspeed, engine power, f lap deployment,

weight and weight distribution, together with

knowledge of the technical parameters that

determine the edge of the flight envelope. Some of

these factors relate to the plane, and some relate

to external conditions. All these indicators must

be combined to identify a potential stall.

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 7

Thanks to the availabilit y of simulators,

commercial airline pilots are now trained to

recognize and deal with an amazing array of

possible scenarios, many of which they will never

encounter in real life.10 They learn how various

scenarios would manifest t

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