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Evaluating Policing Models and Their Effectiveness in Modern Society
Criminology · Chapter 19: Policing in AmericaSection 19.5 · lesson 82 of 91video coming soon
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In this lesson
Measures, accountability mechanisms, reforms, and the evidence standard.
- Explain the measurement problem in evaluating police.
- Select measures for evaluating police performance.
- Describe the accountability mechanisms and what each can reach.
- Assess a reform proposal against evidence and mechanism.
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,557 words). Read along, or search it.
Opening Question
Do Rising Arrests Prove Success?
The chief says the department is doing great, because arrests are up. Is that evidence of a good job? More broadly, how would you know whether any police department is doing well? The question sounds simple, and it is surprisingly hard to answer.
Roadmap
Measuring, Holding Accountable, and Judging Reform
This lesson starts with the measurement problem, and with five categories of performance measures. We look at the danger of activity quotas, and at the contested evidence on use of force. We review the accountability mechanisms, including the debate over qualified immunity. Then we assess several reform proposals by mechanism and by evidence. We finish with the evidence standard a reform claim must meet, and an honest account of what is known. That standard may be the most transferable skill in this chapter.
Core Problem
Crime, Arrests, and Clearance Mislead
Evaluating police performance runs into a fundamental measurement problem. Crime rates are affected by many factors beyond policing, including the structural and process factors of Chapter seven. So it is difficult to attribute a change in crime to policing specifically. Arrest counts measure police activity, not outcomes. A rise in arrests can reflect more offending, or simply more enforcement aimed at the same level of offending. Clearance, examined for homicide in Subchapter eleven point six, depends heavily on witness and victim cooperation. That cooperation is itself shaped by legitimacy, from Subchapter nineteen point one. So clearance rates partly measure community cooperation, not police effectiveness alone. All three share a structure: each is influenced by factors the department does not fully control. Yet each is routinely treated as a clean indicator of performance.
Measure Types
Outcome and Activity Measures Compared
Police performance measures fall into five categories. Each captures something different, and each can be gamed in a different way. Crime and harm outcomes capture the ultimate goal, reduced harm, but are shaped by much beyond police control. Process and activity measures, such as arrests, citations, and stops, capture what police are doing. But they can be inflated by activity that does not improve outcomes.
Measure Types
Trust, Fairness, and Cost Measures
Legitimacy and trust measures, gathered through community surveys, capture public confidence. They are slow to shift, and costly to measure regularly. Procedural justice measures capture the perceived fairness of specific encounters, but need detailed data collection. Cost measures capture the resource efficiency of a strategy, but say nothing directly about effectiveness. That is why using several measures together is necessary, not optional.
Gaming Risk
Ranking Measures by Vulnerability to Gaming
This figure orders the five categories by how readily each can be gamed. The ordering is illustrative, not a set of measured values. Process and activity measures sit at the top, as the most readily gamed. Cost and crime outcomes fall in the middle. A department rewarded mainly on activity will tend to drift toward whatever is easiest to count. Legitimacy and trust, and procedural justice, sit at the bottom. Those are comparatively harder to inflate artificially, because they depend on what the public experiences. The practical lesson is to lean on the harder-to-game measures, while never relying on any one alone.
Key Danger
How Activity Quotas Distort Behavior
Activity quotas are explicit or implicit targets for a specific activity measure, such as citations or arrests. They carry a specific, documented danger. They produce exactly the behavior they measure, whether or not that behavior serves the department's real goals. Consider an officer facing a citation quota. That officer has a direct incentive to issue enough citations to meet it. That incentive exists whether or not the citations improve safety, reduce harm, or serve any substantive purpose. The gap between the measured activity and the underlying goal is the central danger. Any performance framework has to be designed to guard against it.
Use of Force
Graham Standard and Contested Benchmarks
Use of force is governed by a specific legal standard. Force must be objectively reasonable, given the circumstances known to the officer at the time. The Supreme Court set that standard in Graham versus Connor, in nineteen eighty-nine. Data have been a persistent problem. Comprehensive, standardized national data on police use of force have been notably incomplete, though recent efforts have partly improved this. Where force data have been examined for disparities across groups, findings and their interpretation are contested. Researchers disagree substantially about benchmarking, meaning what a group's rate of force should be compared against. Different benchmarks can produce different conclusions from the very same data. Keep two questions apart. What the data show under a properly specified benchmark is an empirical question. What standard should govern force in the first place is a normative one, and neither answer settles the other.
Accountability
Internal Affairs and Early Intervention
Five accountability mechanisms apply to police conduct. Internal affairs investigates policy and conduct violations within the department, under its own administrative standard, with limited independence. Early intervention systems flag patterns across incidents using data thresholds, before a serious incident occurs. They are only as good as the data collected.
Accountability
Oversight, Prosecution, and Civil Liability
Civilian oversight ranges from purely advisory review boards to bodies with independent investigative authority. Advisory-only forms lack binding authority. Prosecutorial accountability applies when conduct meets criminal elements, and requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But prosecutors work closely with police every day, which can complicate their independence in these cases. Civil liability reaches conduct causing a legally recognized harm, proven by a preponderance of the evidence. There, qualified immunity can bar recovery.
Debate
Qualified Immunity and Systemic Patterns
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine. It shields an individual officer from civil liability unless the conduct violated clearly established law. It draws a significant reform debate. Critics argue it makes civil accountability for misconduct too difficult to achieve in practice. Defenders argue it protects officers from liability for good-faith judgment calls. Those calls are often made in fast-moving, ambiguous situations. For systemic, department-wide patterns, there is a further mechanism. Federal pattern-or-practice authority, introduced in Subchapter nineteen point two, is designed for exactly those cases.
Reform Proposals
Training Reform and Body-Worn Cameras
Several reform proposals can be stated with their mechanism and their evidence. Training and policy reform targets officer decision-making, with evidence that varies by content and implementation fidelity. Body-worn cameras aim to increase transparency and accountability in individual encounters. The evidence is mixed: some studies find fewer complaints and use-of-force incidents, and others find limited or inconsistent effects. Much depends on department policy for camera activation and footage review.
Reform Proposals
Force Standards, Non-Police Responders, Budgets
Changes to force standards target the legal or policy threshold for when force may be used. Reallocating certain calls, such as some mental health or welfare checks, to non-police responders aims to reduce unsuitable police encounters. There is early evidence from specific pilot programs, but little large-scale evaluation. Budget reallocation shifts resources between policing and other public services. Its evidence depends heavily on what the reallocated resources are actually used for.
Evidence Standard
What Makes a Reform Claim Established
For a reform claim to count as established, rather than merely promising, it must meet a standard. It must show an effect across more than one setting. And it must use a design that accounts for the concurrent-trend problem from Subchapter nineteen point four. Many claims in this area rest on single-site studies, one program in one department. Those cannot show that a finding will generalize to a department with different conditions and different implementation. That is not a reason to dismiss them, but it is a reason to treat them as preliminary until replicated.
Quick Check
Three States, One Reform Result
Quick check. A reform cut complaints in three departments, in three different states. Each study compared similar departments that did not adopt it, over the same years. Established, or only promising? Pause, and decide. Established, by this standard. The effect repeats across settings, and the comparison accounts for concurrent trends. A single department's success, by contrast, would only be promising.
Honest Account
Calibrating Confidence Under Uncertainty
The honest position is that policing reform involves genuine, ongoing empirical uncertainty. Some findings are more robust than others; hot spots evidence, for example, is stronger than that for many accountability reforms. Calibrate your confidence to the evidence, not to how plausible or politically appealing a claim seems. Institutions still have to act under uncertainty, but they should be honest about how strong their evidence really is.
Applied Scenario
Designing a Quota-Resistant Oversight Framework
Consider an oversight board designing a performance framework that avoids quota-style behavior. The board should consider a mix of measures. That mix could include crime and harm outcomes, legitimacy and trust surveys, and procedural justice measures. Cost can be included too, as long as it is read alongside effectiveness. What the board should avoid is relying on process and activity counts as the primary or sole measure. Arrests, citations, and stops are the most readily gamed. More generally, no single category should stand alone. A framework built this way rewards outcomes and fair treatment, rather than raw activity.
Practice
Classifying Example Performance Measures
Let's classify some example measures. Monthly citations and arrests in a period are process and activity measures. A confidence survey, and a trust measure after a policy change, are legitimacy and trust measures. The annual budget and the per-incident cost of a strategy are cost measures. A victimization rate for an offense is a crime and harm outcome. A survey of perceived fairness in a specific encounter is a procedural justice measure.
Reverse Problem
Citations Rose but Harm Did Not
Now the reverse problem. Citations rose substantially, but the harm they targeted did not change. What is the most likely explanation? Pause, and decide. The most likely explanation is gaming: officers were meeting an activity target, not the underlying goal. That is the quota danger in its plainest form.
Key Takeaways
Four Points to Carry Forward
Let's pull it together. Crime, arrests, and clearance are not clean indicators. Five measure types exist, and activity counts are easiest to game. Each accountability tool reaches only some conduct. And a reform claim needs replication across settings.
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About Evaluating Policing Models and Their Effectiveness in Modern Society
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What are the main types of police performance measures, and which are easiest to game?
What is a police activity quota, and why is it a problem?
What do the main police accountability mechanisms do, and what can qualified immunity block?
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