The Road to Police Measures
Policing in the United States is under scrutiny. While some argue it’s a system beyond repair and call for its abolition, others point to rising crime rates as a reason to invest more heavily in law enforcement.
Measures for Justice believes the best way to enable communities to reshape a system is to help them understand as much about it as possible, and this requires clear, accessible, and holistic data to illuminate the system’s complexities and inform meaningful change.
To meet this need, we’ve developed a national set of Police Measures designed with input from both community leaders and law enforcement agencies.
Our Dimensions of Police Performance offers a higher-level view of how we frame conversations about measuring policing. Within these dimensions are many different measures. Measures are a means of gauging performance, and they give us an overview of how a police department is doing in areas we think are important.
But of course, “we” are actually not the arbiters here of what is important. To create a national set of police measures, we solicited input from people who are directly impacted by how police do their work: local communities and the police themselves. We also consulted with scholars, researchers, and experts in the field of measurement.
To do this, we hosted a series of community listening sessions as well as a Roundtable in partnership with The Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE). Some of these meetings were held with national subject matter experts and stakeholders, and others were held locally within our two pilot sites. The National sessions helped to frame both our dimensions and an initial measures list. The listening sessions with community members helped us to understand what communities are most interested in learning about their police departments. These insights helped fine-tune our measures and narrow down some additional context within them.
The result was a draft set of measures we then needed to test in actual police departments to see if the data was even there to run through our measures.
We focused on eight key areas:
- Trust, Legitimacy, and Community Engagement
- Crime Reduction and Calls for Service
- Use of Force
- Least Harm Practices and Alternatives to Arrest
- Accountability
- Officer Wellness
- Responsibility
- Recruitment and Training
In these areas, we wanted to be able to answer key questions like:
- Calls for Service: How long does it take for an officer to arrive on scene after being called?
- Use of Force: How many unique incidents of force occur?
- Officer Wellness: How many hours of overtime does the staff work?
- Accountability: How many complaints were reviewed by the department, were sustained, and resulted in disciplinary action?
Our rationale for this work is that even though public opinion tends to toggle between support for the police and hostility toward the police, the police continue to do their work either way. And we need insight into what that work amounts to at the trend and pattern level so police can adjust accordingly to meet the needs of the communities they serve.
While we are beginning with a core set of measures in our pilot sites, we continue to refine additional measures so that as departments improve data collection, meaning additional insights can be populated and displayed.
