The Consolidation of Urban Public Services: A Focus on the Police

Abstract

A rguments dealing with the issue of the consolidation of urban governmental services and/or governmental units in metropolitan areas are familiar to most practitioners and academics concerned with the study of urban politics and administration. Most introductory texts on urban affairs, for example, characteristically devote a section of readings describing and evaluating the fragmented metropolis.' Moreover, unlike many issues of interest to political science and public administration, the question of governmental consolidation extends beyond academia. The consolidation of urban governments has been the subject of popular press coverage, numerous voter referenda, and has been the focus of attention of a variety of local, state, and federal governmental and nongovernmental commissions.2 While the debate on municipal consolidation has generally been couched in terms of multi-purpose governmental consolidations (e.g., city and county mergers, Unigov and Metro consolidation, etc.), an essential dimension of the arguments supportive of areawide metropolitan government has been the thought that the consolidation of particular urban governmental services, such as public safety departments, would lead to a more effective and equitable system for the provision of public services. The purpose of this article will be to review a rapidly growing body of literature which is highly critical of municipal consolidation, and, in particular, as consolidation relates to the provision of police services.3 In addition to reviewing this literature, this article will also attempt to do an empirical evaluation of some of the major positions relating specifically to the police. * A set of literature in public administration has recently emerged, associated with the Public Choice perspective, which argues against metropolitan consolidation-and police consolidation specifically. This article reviews the major assertions which the anticonsolidationists make in specific reference to the consolidation of urban police departments: (1) that larger police departments are not more efficient or economical; and (2) that citizen satisfaction with urban police services varies inversely with the size of the municipality. On the first assertion the authors find that evidence is still inconclusive regarding the economy and efficiency of larger police departments. To evaluate the second assertion Campbell and Schuman's study of citizen attitudes in 15 American cities was reanalyzed. The results indicate that, contrary to the anti-consolidationist viewpoint, citizen satisfaction with police services is more a reflection of the differentiated socioeconomic characteristics of central cities and suburban cities than a function of city size. Evidence further suggests that if all things were equal, larger jurisdictions would produce more satisfying police services.