An environment-adjusted evaluation of citizen satisfaction with local police effectiveness: Evidence from a conditional Data Envelopment Analysis approach

Abstract

Hard data alone are not sufficient to evaluate local police effectiveness in the new age of community policing. Citizens can provide useful feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses of police operations. However, citizen satisfaction indicators typically fail to accurately convey the multidimensional nature of local policing and account for characteristics that are non-controllable for the local police departments. In this paper, we construct a measure of perceived effectiveness of community oriented police forces that accounts for both multidimensional aspects of local policing and exogenous influences. In specific, this paper suggests the use of a multivariate conditional, robust order-m version of a non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis approach with no inputs. We show the potentiality of the method by constructing and analyzing perceived effectiveness indicators of local police forces in Belgium. The findings suggest that perceived police effectiveness is significantly conditioned by the demographic and socioeconomic environment.