A Scale to Measure Effectiveness of Police Functioning

Any measurement of the effectiveness of governmental functioning involves critical consideration of the standard against which measurement takes place. It is quite impossible to measure, except in terms of something akin to a yardstick. The determination of the criterion permitting the formulation of more or less of something of significance about government functioning is made particularly difficult in a democracy because the public administrator is presumed to be the servant of the citizenry and the standard of success, under such conditions, must ever be compliance with an effective sector of citizen opinions. In an authoritarian governmental system it might be compatible with established values for the authoritarian head of the state to announce a standard as commensurate with his will and desire. If this were done the possibility of measurement would be simplified. There is an ever present urge to slip into the easy road of projecting some authoritarian end as an ideal and then seek to measure the relative attainment of this end. The most common error of this nature is to assume that efficiency is a valid tenet of value and that measurement can take place against this as frame of reference. There are then, two basic problems to be faced in any attempt to measure effectiveness of policing in a democracy. First, it is necessary to determine what the standard of approvals and disapprovals of police practices and behaviors is at a particular time. Second, it is necessary to devise some methodology permitting determination of the difference between what actually exists and what is desired or approved by an effective sector of citizen opinion. Any attempt to determine the standard of citizen opinion in police administration runs into a particular difficulty that the law, as represented by statutes and judicial interpretation, is not an adequate guide to effective citizen approvals. It is notorious that police protect or ignore prostitution, gambling and at times, liquor enterprises, when the standard of the law prohibits them. It is also no professional secret that police chiefs cannot safely ignore the

Cartography · Data mining · Geography · Computer Science · European Criminal Justice and Data Protection · Psychology

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