Title: Measuring What Matters Part Two: Developing Measures of What the Police Do.
Subject: Information systems, police planning
and management, problem-oriented policing, media
Author: Thomas V. Brady
Series: NIJ Research in Action
Published: November 1997
41 pages
71,000 bytes

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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Research in Action

Jeremy Travis, Director
November 1997

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Measuring What Matters Part Two: Developing 
Measures of What the Police Do

A Report From the Policing Research Institute
Sponsored by NIJ and the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services

When we worked for police departments, we kept a
managerial eye on our friends in the private
sector. The bottom line told them whether what
they did mattered. Economic success or failure was
the clear measure of their performance. You do
well, you flourish; you perform poorly enough, you
close your doors.

Police departments don't go out of business; good
or bad, they survive. So absent the unequivocal
report card that the bottom line in business
provides, how do police departments (1) know what
they are doing matters, and (2) how do they
measure what matters?

These are not idle squadroom questions. Policing
is a costly, complex enterprise whose
practitioners intervene with citizens 24 hours a
day on matters ranging from homicide to blaring
radios. Depending on your angle of vision,
policing is crucial to the aggressive control of
crime; a vital partner in maintaining a
community's cohesion and sense of well-being;
essential to neutralizing the forces of disorder
and enhancing the quality of life in
neighborhoods; and the vigorous source of
innovative solutions to chronic problems, whether
juvenile gun violence, for example, or street
corner prostitution.

Jurisdictions may assign one, two, or all of these
purposes to their police departments. Whatever
police departments are asked to do, our questions
are central to understanding and judging their
operations even though we know the answers are
sometimes stubbornly difficult to achieve. To
repeat, how do police departments (1) know what
they are doing matters, and (2) how do they
measure what matters?

They are questions we brought to Washington when
we were appointed to run two Department of Justice
agencies that deal with policing. To explore
answers, our agencies--the National Institute of
Justice (NIJ) and the Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services (COPS)--sponsored three meetings
in 1995-96. We invited police officials and
criminal justice scholars and researchers to take
part along with representatives of community
organizations and journalists. The meetings,
entitled "Measuring What Matters," were held under
the auspices of the NIJ/COPS Policing Research
Institute.

We expected no tangible or final answers to our
questions. Experience told us measurable bottom
lines in policing are elusive. Indeed, the
participants came to no uniform conclusions. There
is an immediate tension in the room when you ask
criminologists and police chiefs to consider
measuring what the police do, observed Carl B.
Klockars, professor of criminal justice at the
University of Delaware. Klockars said:
    
"Criminologists believe measurement is
difficult, complicated, time consuming, and
expensive. Inferences from even the best
measurements must be made with great caution.
Police leaders believe measurement ought to be
easy, simple, quick, and cheap. Inferences should
be obvious, helpful, and, whenever possible,
favorable."

The meetings did surface in one arena many of the
considerations and ingredients involved in
measuring what the police do. Moreover, the final
meeting provided useful and novel perspectives and
ideas. Some examples:

o   Police should consider having a Uniform
Crime Reports (UCR)-like index measuring disorder
as a companion to the FBI's UCR on major felonies.

o   There are six attributes of a healthy
police agency, and these attributes provide grist
for measurement.

o   An important part of police work is best
assessed through police-citizen encounters, which
have four aspects--fairness, civility, concern,
and apparent effort.

o   To get a different perspective on
measuring themselves, the police can view
themselves through the prism of business and
industry so that they see their work as providing
products to customers in a marketplace.

A report of the first of the three meetings, held
in late 1995, captures the initial, at times
outspoken, debate among 45 participants. The
report, Measuring What Matters--Part One: Measures
of Crime, Fear, and Disorder, is available from
NIJ.

This report focuses on the second and third
meetings when participants concentrated on police
accountability to the public and on developing and
implementing outcome-based police performance
measures.

Seven specially commissioned papers were prepared
for the second meeting, which is discussed in the
section entitled "Perspectives on the Police"
beginning on page 11. Another major section,
starting on page 12, deals with the police and the
news media.

A report of the final meeting, held on December 4,
1996, follows.

Jeremy Travis and Joseph E. Brann

Before becoming Director of the National Institute
of Justice, Jeremy Travis was deputy commissioner
for legal matters for the New York City Police
Department. Joseph E. Brann, Director of the
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, is
a 26-year veteran of police service, including 5
years as chief of the Hayward, California, Police
Department.

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What Do You Wish to Measure?

The main business of the final meeting was the
deliberations of four groups drawn from the
meeting's participants. Robert H. Langworthy,
director, Justice Center, University of Alaska-
Anchorage, and Carl B. Klockars, professor of
criminal justice at the University of Delaware,
prepared them for their task. The day's
proceedings were moderated by Francis X. Hartmann,
executive director of the Program in Criminal
Justice Policy and Management at Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government.

Klockars is a maker of checklists and provider of
droll advice. Thus he told police chiefs at the
meeting:

o   Everything you measure can and will be
held against you.

o   Measure all those things that can be
counted to your credit.

o   If you cannot get away with measuring only
your credits, measure both what can and will be
held against you and what may be counted to your
credit.

He prepared this checklist of "Cheap Measures of
What Really Matters:"

Measurement

o   What, exactly, is it that you wish to
measure? The most important thing about
measurement is to define the problem that you want
to measure in the proper way.

o   Is the problem worth standardizing? If so,
as what?

o   What is gained and what is lost by
attaching numbers to it by some rule?

o   Do you wish to unleash the power of
mathematics to describe it?

o   If so, who will profit from your doing so?

o   Who will gain access to the power of the
numbers?

Cheap

o   Is measurement, relative to the
alternatives, inexpensive?

o   Is it really worth it relative to
benefits?

o   Can measurement be accomplished as a side
benefit of doing something else that ought to or
has to be done? Is it "free?"

Does it really matter?

o   What do I gain by measuring?

o   What do I risk by not measuring?

o   Does it measure success as well as
failure?

o   Can it be made to measure success only?

Measure What You Can Control

Other advice Klockars offered police chiefs:
    
"Measure what really matters, by which I
mean things you can be held accountable for and
things that are under your control and about which
you can actually do something. One of the
difficulties about the police relationship with
crime is that although the police are often
evaluated by whether crime goes up or crime goes
down, they don't have the capacity in many ways to
control it. In some areas they can; in others,
they can't. So the idea is, mobilize measurements
for which you properly can be held accountable and
which can count what you do."

Like others at the meeting, Klockars urged using
data from computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems as
a bountiful source of information for measurement.
CAD data provide a valuable "description of what
in fact police do day in and day out" and what
people want from the police, Klockars said.

He also urged the police to measure "because it's
under your control to change how well your people
deliver service to the people who ask for it. I
think all these measures of fear in the community
really are pointless. They are so heavily mediated
by what people see on the 5 o'clock news that they
are not under your control. What is under your
control as a police chief is whether officers
delivered requested service." (For other
viewpoints on the news media and the police, see
the section on page 12.)

Klockars noted the enduring debate between social
scientists and the police about the quality of
police statistics. "Police reports of crime are
subject to a variety of types of discretion.
Citizen discretion in reporting--police don't know
about crime generally speaking unless somebody
reports it. There's perpetrator efforts at
concealing crimes that go on. There's police
discretion in how they record crimes. Finally, in
a large variety of crimes for which there is often
no immediate complaint--gambling, prostitution,
corruption, etc.--all police statistics measure is
the amount of resources that they place in
discovering those things." 

Yet, he said, "Despite all the criticisms that
criminologists have of police statistics, they're
absolutely irresistible and the reason is that
they are free. Cops generate them in the course of
doing the work that they do."

Klockars suggested ways to measure police
competence, skill, and integrity. His ideas are
contained in a detailed paper that is included in
a forthcoming NIJ volume of all papers prepared
for the three meetings.

Langworthy stressed a need to develop measures the
police can routinely collect information on and
make them meaningful to the people who use them.
He said the measures should tend to be of the type
Klockars said police leaders prefer--easy, simple,
cheap, and from which useful inferences can be
made.

Langworthy assigned to the four groups their areas
for discussion, which he called conceptual
domains.

o   The impact domain is a cluster of items
that the police are supposed to affect--crime,
fear of crime, and disorder.

o   The organizational health domain deals
with the nature and volume of police business and
community support as well as the level of job
satisfaction of police employees and their
knowledge of their jobs.

o   The process domain deals with fairness,
civility, equitable service, and ethical service,
and the community assessment domain deals with
police abilities and ethical behavior. Both
address the way the police do their work.

o   The community context domain involves
social cohesion, informal social control, and
political and social structures.

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Group One Report: A UCR for Disorder

Group One, which explored measures for crime, fear
of crime, and disorder, suggested the possibility
of creating a national index for disorder tied to
the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) the Federal Bureau
of Investigation publishes on major felonies.
Edward Flynn, chief of the Chelsea, Massachusetts,
Police Department, explained:

"At the end of the day, when we're talking about
measurement, we're inevitably talking about
comparisons. Everybody wants to know how they
shape up, how they compare. When you tell them
about their problem, it's 'compared to what?'

"Basically, over the years the conventional wisdom
about policing is that 80 to 85 percent of it is
not crime related. Yet the only thing we measure
and track for the whole country is the 20 percent
that is crime related. Eighty percent of our
picture is just out there, and we're just kind of
dealing with it in a very localized way.

"So we thought, 'What if you had a UCR index for
disorder?' You try to track it in the aggregate
using calls for service, for all their
imperfections. If we can impose on our calls for
service some basic order of standardization for a
noise complaint, a domestic violence complaint, a
kids-on-the-corner complaint--if we can impose
that basic order--what we would have over time is
a measure of the reality of the public's
perceptions of the problem [of disorder].

"It's not so much that I need to know exactly how
many prostitutes on the corner I have, no. But I
need to know how many calls about prostitutes I
have because that tells me about the concerns and
priorities of that neighborhood. We have all been
to the same block associations. Nobody at a block
watch ever complains about bank robbery. We all
know what they complain about, and then we all go
off and deal with it all alone, with no context.

"What we're trying to come up with is a way to
take the huge amount of police-community work and 
put it in a context that I can pull out the Uniform 
Crime Reports and say, 'This is how Chelsea shapes 
up compared to cities of similar size.' You're not 
alone from a comparative point of view. From a 
specific point of view, yes, I need to know what 
that's telling me about my neighborhoods.

"But it's a huge amount of data we do collect, and
we thought maybe there's a positive use that can
be made of it, that we can come up with half a
dozen index crimes, come up with a half dozen key
indicators of complaints to police that tell you
about the shape of your city. If you monitor the
calls per thousand, they probably tell you a heck
of a lot more about your neighborhood's or city's
health than the larcenies per thousand.

"And the thing about trying to hook it into the
UCR, that's already fairly cheap because it's
built into our costs. It's already got
credibility, for all the shortcomings of it, to
the broad community, society, and media. If it's
UCR-approved, it's real."

Mary Ann Wycoff, senior research associate for the
Police Executive Research Forum, added, "We all
know how disastrous call coding is in trying to
capture incidents that come under the heading of
disorder. We're hoping that some major departments
might consider the idea of creating a UCR-like
index for disorders and help to develop strong
measures to back it up. The suggestion was made
that efforts begin in metropolitan areas so that
you bring clusters of departments together to work
on them. Perhaps you can then start encouraging
many other departments to seriously examine their
coding processes and rethink how they collect and
store data on disorders. Eventually, this would
help everybody with problem solving."

Data Can Be Used Against You

Jean Johnson, director of programs for Public
Agenda, a nonpartisan research organization,
presented the overall report of the group's
discussions. She said a cautionary "overarching
theme" emerging from the group was: "If we're
going to measure certain things, you have to
really keep in mind how the data are going to be
used. Data can and will be used against you not
only by the press in a political sense but also it
can be used in sort of a departmental rivalry in
municipal areas."

First, she said, the group worked "on an inventory
of indices focusing on quality of life, coming up
with items such as truancy, vacant buildings,
unemployment, AFDC [Aid to Families With Dependent
Children] participation, public housing, whether
there were afterschool activities, property
values, demographic changes, influx of immigrants
to the area. There was a sense that these items,
while it's worthwhile to measure them, are--for a
lot of police departments--their context. These
may be warning signs; they may allow you to
compare how you're doing with other cities; but
you can't really do that much about them."

Next, she said, the group worked on "indices to
measure what people are worried about and what the
police are reacting to in the category of
disorder--calls about the unruly, unsupervised
kids, reports of prostitution, reports of dealing
drugs, noise complaints, domestic violence,
abandoned autos, public drunkenness. The group
concluded that most police chiefs need
measurements that are quite specific and accurate
for them to be useful.

"In terms of the source for measurements, we
focused on calls for service and expanded that to
include the self-initiated action of police
officers when they're out on patrol.

"There was [also] a feeling that if people call
the department, they think that something is very
important and they want the police to do something
about it, and that's an indicator in and of
itself. It's a kind of urgency measurement."

Ralph Taylor, a professor of criminal justice at
Temple University, said an idea "that emerged was,
`Let's see if we can standardize calls for
service.' At the front end of that, of course,
there were a range of questions about what does
that mean. We didn't want to get grandiose, but at
one level you could think of a range of validation
studies or criterion studies that sort of explored
the meaning of these reports. Then one sets up
[measures that are] sort of agreed to across
jurisdictions.

"The other idea is following up on samples of
calls for service because the question is not only
what are the problems and where are they, but,
when the police went out, did they fix them? So
there could be callbacks to a sample of folks who
called the police to see if things did get fixed."

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Group Two Report: The Six Attributes Of a Healthy 
Police Organization

Group Two dealt with organizational health and
developed what it called the six attributes of a
healthy police organization. The group's findings
were reported by Stephen D. Mastrofski, professor
of criminal justice at Michigan State University.

1.   "The healthy police organization knows
what it wants to accomplish. It has articulated
goals. When we say goals, we're not talking about
`To serve and protect,' which is obviously too
general. We're talking about goals that can be
expressed in an operational form. These goals can
be appreciated by the people--certainly
middle-management supervisors and especially the
rank and file--who have to carry them out. The
goals can be assessed, meaning that there are
measures, indices, of things that are reflective
of the goals."

2.   "The healthy police organization needs to
know its citizens. Are they getting what they
want? What they are entitled to? They are not just
those who call and complain, who summon the
police, or who rattle the cage of the police.
Those who don't surface are in the ambit here,
residents in a neighborhood, businesses, and so
on. Finally, there are those whom we often think
of as the objects of police control--the offender,
the troublemaker--they, too, are people who need
to be considered in terms of their experiences
with the police. There are a variety of user
surveys that could measure transactions with
citizens, for example, periodic citizen surveys of
the community. We think it is very important to
break them down into units that matter.
Oftentimes, the breakdown will be for patrol
officers, for example, at the beat level."

3.   "The healthy police organization knows its
business, the demands that are placed upon it.
Calls for service are a cheap and readily
available source of information in this regard.
The department needs to know why `business' is
increasing or decreasing. And knowing more about
business wouldn't be limited to relying on calls
for service. There are a variety of other ways
that business comes to police. Special efforts
would have to be made in terms of measuring
proactive efforts by officers, particularly trying
to capture programmatic efforts. For example,
problem-oriented policing requires not just random
responses or responses to individual incidents but
responses that are planned and coordinated to
accomplish some objectives."

4.   "The healthy police organization knows
what it's doing about the demands of business. It
has the ability to monitor resource allocations
and officer activities. In terms of community
policing, it knows what other agencies and
organizations are doing that are pertinent to the
problems it's trying to deal with."

5.   "A healthy police organization knows its
people. Things that would tell us what people get
from their jobs, what they are looking for from
their jobs, what motivates them about their work .
. . what demoralizes them. Knowing these things
would help drive decisions about supervision,
training, recruitment, job design. . . . The
obvious implication in terms of measurement here
is conducting surveys which, in this case, are
relatively inexpensive because you have a more or
less captive audience within the organization."

6.   "The healthy police organization feeds
back information to people and groups who need to
know. To do this, you need to know what they need
to know, what they want to know, and how they need
to get it. Whether it's neighborhood groups that
need to know more about the kind of service that
they're getting, whether it's victim groups, or
whether it's constituents within the organization.
They are all users of information."

Measuring Corruption

Discussions on organizational health turned to
ways of measuring corruption.

"There are some measures that trigger a need for
additional, intense measurement," according to
Michael E. Clark, president of the Citizens
Committee for New York City. "One of those is the
historic problem in New York--the dilemma of
corruption. If corruption complaints go up, that's
treated by the media as a sign that things are
bad; if corruption complaints go down, that's
treated by the media as a sign that things are
bad. How to fix that?

"One way is by targeted sting operations in cases
where you have some indication that there is a
problem. If you do that in a random enough way,
you're able to pick up a statistically valid sort
of measurement of what the level of the problem
is. You also seem to be acting to do something
about it [corruption] at the same time, which is a
way of staying off the horns of that dilemma."

William Bratton, former police commissioner of New
York City, described the "twin dilemma" of
corruption in similar terms. "If it goes down,
you're not doing enough; if it goes up, you're not
doing enough."

When he was commissioner, Bratton said, "We went
to professional pollsters who indicated that with
an organization with 38,000 police you'd need to
do 700 stings each year to have after several
years a valid base to measure whether it
[corruption] is up or whether it's down. So, on
average, the department now every year will do at
least 700 stings. This year they will do almost
900 because of some additional targeting they're
doing. After a couple of years, you'll then be in
a position, hopefully, that if complaints go up,
you can argue it's as the result of the work
you're doing rather than an actual increase in the
problem."

Triggers for Inquiry

Group Two also explored the uses of data from
computer-aided dispatch systems to detect problems
in the field. Comparisons made using CAD data can
be "triggers for inquiry," as Langworthy put it.

Robert Ford, chief of the Port Orange, Florida,
Police Department, described "looking at the mix
of calls from CAD and comparing it with the mix of
outcomes recorded by the officers responding.
There are some powerful data there in
understanding where you may have potential
problems, and there are some very interesting
indicators that could be of value for a lot of
departments.

"For example, domestic violence. Out of every 100
domestic violence calls assigned by CAD, how many
of them come back labeled as domestic violence by
the officers? You can say a lot about how officers
are handling calls just with that information. So
you're talking about a series of measures that
come from your own data that, while they may not
tell you anything immediate, will tell to look
into that issue in more detail. Calls should
follow a certain pattern. When you see differences
from the normal, it gives you a valuable insight
into starting to look for potential problems."

Bratton said, "The way it's used in New York, you
have 76 precincts. For every 100 calls, if, on
average, 85 of those calls, after investigation,
are classified domestic violence but some
precincts are only showing 75 and others showing
110 percent, those ones that are showing 75--you
go in and find out what's going on in that
precinct that is below the norm. The same thing
for arrests. It's a way of detecting a blip that
allows you then to focus more attention on what
that blip might be telling you."

For Langworthy, "Most of what we are talking about
here are measures that really are triggers for
inquiry. They're not things that give you any
answers; they tell you where you need to start
looking. So you make comparisons.

"There's a crime analyst who's essentially said
there is a normal level of crime. When I see a
departure from that, then we have something that
we have to try to figure out. It doesn't mean that
things are bad. It just means that there is
something different there now than there was
before.

"What we can do if we have systems in place is
look at the triggers. That holds for virtually all
the things that we are talking about. Absentee
rates, for instance. You may find out that
absentee rates skyrocket one week. That can be
because you got Blue Flu [police staying away from
work to protest agency policy], or it can be
because you got Type-A Flu. You don't know what
the reason is by looking at the blip; you only
know that you have to go look."

Klockars cautioned, "One of the experiences we
have, of course, is that agencies, institutions,
quickly develop such things [indicators] into
quotas. That kind of thing happens in traffic and
in all sorts of other areas. The officer out there
whose sergeant says, `The average is 4.1 tickets
per X amount of times, and you're only doing
three. Let's get going'--that's not an indicator
any more, that's a quota."

Moderator Hartmann asked about the cost of data
used to trigger inquiries.

Bratton: "How cheap? There's really no cost when
you're using information that's being generated in
the course of your normal business. The expense
comes when you hit a trigger, you've got to go out
and look at it. But crime statistical information,
you're generating that anyway. The prioritization
of calls--domestic violence, for example--for
review to learn what officers' actions are is not
really a cost. It's data that are already being
generated in the normal course of business but
using that information for a different purpose."

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Group Three Report: Citizen Satisfaction, 
Equity, and Ethical Service

Group Three dealt with process and community
assessment domains focused on three matters--
categories it called citizen satisfaction with
police encounters, equity of police service
provision, and ethical service. Wesley G. Skogan,
a professor of political science at Northwestern
University, summed up the discussions:

Citizen satisfaction. "An important part of police
work--not all, of course--is best assessed through
police-citizen encounters." Encounters have four
aspects--fairness, civility, concern, and apparent
effort. "The fairness and civility dimensions turn
out to be the strongest predictors of relative
satisfaction with police-initiated encounters with
citizens. The concern and effort indicators are
predictors of citizen satisfaction with
citizen-initiated encounters with the police. In
some way, all four of them play out in almost
every police-citizen encounter."

Ways cited to measure citizens' satisfaction with
police encounters range from officers handing out
postcard questionnaires to people they come in
contact with to letters sent to crime victims
inquiring about their treatment to telephone
surveys of people who have various contacts with
police service. The group stressed the importance
of police organizations taking these survey
results seriously, "about putting in place an
analysis and reporting system that would use these
data internally. In Madison, Wisconsin, for
example, after they accumulate for a while,
officers get postcards back so they can see what
people have said anonymously about the contact
that they've had. It's important to find ways to
use these data as learning and teaching tools as
well as assessment tools."

Equity. The group dealt with the equity of police
service provision in terms of "equality in the
distribution of the public good of policing and
the public good that comes from effective
policing." Matters such as officer deployment--
"how many officers when, where, on what shifts"--
and measures of service delivery such as response
and service time could be obtained "quite easily
out of existing departmental information systems.
With some work, analytic tabulations that would
routinely report on the distributional aspects of
the delivery of police services and the equality
of distribution could easily be done."

Disagreements arise "over the standards by which
equality should be judged. In Chicago, for
example, officers are distributed in a weighted
workload formula that takes into account burglary
and other kinds of crimes. Critics of this simply
want to divide the number of officers in every
district by the amount of violent crime and use
that as their only standard. When they do that,
they come up with a recommendation for a different
distribution of officers than the weighted
workload formula."

Ethical service. This dimension encompasses
"corruption both grand and petty, police use of
force, the integrity of the crime-reporting
process, and, more generally, internal recording
and reporting. It overlaps heavily with fairness
because racism, hate bias, and other kinds of
unfairness in the delivery of services fall in the
ethical domain as well as in the service delivery
domain. Some kinds of ethical problems manifest
themselves in police conduct in public; other
kinds of ethical problems principally manifest
themselves within the organization, . . .
violation of organizational rules."

The Need for Clear Standards and Policies

Skogan said Group Three "called for clarity about
what standards and policies are within a
department because you can't begin to measure
things until you have clarity of standards and
policies. We talked about how normative,
situational, and textual many of these kinds of
things are. [It's quite] difficult to develop
ongoing, easy flowing indicators of them. We noted
that many departments don't routinely collect data
on even the most elemental of them, including
police use of force. And it's been principally
through lawsuits that they have been pushed in the
direction of doing so.

"We ended up endorsing the idea of realistically,
carefully documenting the procedures by which a
department attempts to ensure compliance with
policies regarding ethical issues--documenting not
just public complaints but following up what
otherwise is basically a black hole, documenting
the extent to which they [complaints] are
reviewed, the extent to which the various kinds of
infractions, or various kinds of exonerations,
have been concluded. But principally we think this
is a management issue, not so much a measuring
issue."

The group also discussed "the practicality of
survey research as a way of trying to assess the
views and experiences of the general public as
opposed to people who have been clients or
consumers of police services. Many cities find
that they can afford to include police questions
in omnibus service delivery surveys that are being
done by their cities. Of course, we think that
that's terrific.

"But many police administrators are going to have
to live with much more rough-and-ready indicators
of what the mass public thinks. We talked about
these as a way of putting people's fingers on the
pulse of the community: Informal street corner
surveys, brief questionnaires administered in
shopping malls and strip malls, informal focus
groups with activists and informed citizens, and,
very interestingly, using the schools as places
where vital constituencies of the police--teenage
kids--come together on a regular basis. We can
easily envision a survey of high school seniors,
for example, talking about crime problems,
encounters with the police, quality of life, and
that can quite easily be monitored because of the
inexpensive capacity to do a kind of yearly senior
survey in a school setting that would give you an
inexpensive handle on a vital and core
constituency."

-------------------------------------------------------

Group Four Report: Community Context Indices

Group Four discussed indices of factors within the
community that point to its condition. The group's
report was made by Clarence Harmon, former police
chief of St. Louis, Missouri, who, subsequent to
the final meeting, was elected the city's new
mayor.

Among the factors the group examined were:

Demography. "Family structure and economic
structure indices could be measured in terms of
what outcomes we might look at to tell us whether
we were improving or not in terms of services."

Organizational infrastructure. "Whether community
organizations had the capacity to effectively
function is an indicator of progress or lack of
progress. The number of not-for-profit
organizations--whether they were holding meetings-
-and block parties being held in communities are
positive indicators. Permits for parades and other
functions are positive indicators that the
community is holding up and that we had made some
progress in terms of our service delivery and a
community-based effort."

Informal social controls. Graffiti is one index.
"In California there's a graffiti hotline that a
number of departments operate as a mechanism for
cleaning it up. Having such a mechanism would be
an indicator of whether or not that phenomenon was
growing. If you earmarked efforts to reduce
graffiti, and it declined in terms of the reports
of the hotline, it might be a good index that
efforts were successful."

Domestic violence is "an indicator of how
effective [police] personnel can be in dealing
with neighborhood issues, but only, I would argue,
to a small degree. There are a lot of other issues
that impact domestic violence, not all of which,
in my opinion, are easily understood or easily
affected by the police--poverty being among them.

"Truancy and school attendance, teenage pregnancy,
and repeat calls of single incidents are measures
of the wellness of a particular community."

Indices of social cohesion. "Resident turnover as
measured by school enrollment, school turnover in
terms of kids entering and leaving, liquor outlet
densities, are indices of social cohesion or the
lack thereof."

Critical incidents. One index is "emergency room
admissions. One of the indicators we're looking at
in St. Louis is the impact of having taken a
number of officers out of drug enforcement and
placed them in patrol. One of the indicators that
shifting officers has been a problem is an
increase in the number of admissions in emergency
rooms for heroin addiction and cocaine problems.
We're not necessarily seeing an increase in the
arrests for those same offenses."

-------------------------------------------------------

The Summarizing Session: Policing Through the Prism 
of Business and Industry

An unconventional way of exploring policing and
ways of measuring it is to employ the
understandings and language of business and
industry. Jack Greene, a professor of criminal
justice at Temple University, used this approach
in the summarizing session of the final meeting.
"We are to assist police departments in a process
of conceptualizing what matters, identifying how
to measure it, and implementing [those measures]
in several places with the hope of improving what
I would say is the industry," according to Greene.
"We're looking at where this industry is going and
where individual firms in the marketplace are."

The following are excerpts from Greene's summation
that used, as he said, "a lot of business jargon."

Market dynamics. For police departments, market
dynamics are "community context data--information
about shifts in population bases, changes in
school-age population, changes in elderly
population, shifts in welfare policy, level of
teenage pregnancy, illiteracy." These data help to
indicate "where the products that the police
produce are likely to have a market and an impact
and an attachment." They typically are available
from Federal census information, local
universities, and municipal research departments.
"Unfortunately, many police agencies have been
reluctant to get into a marketplace analysis; more
often, police are driven by market dynamics rather
than either trying to predict or affect them."

Market segmentation. "People don't use the police
the same way, and lots of people use the police
for different purposes. So the market is already
segmented. It's segmented by age; by the location
of the community in which people reside; between
residential communities and communities that are
defined on the basis of retail trade or industry
or other factors. So market segmentation gives us
a chance to look at subpopulations. It begins to
say, `Let's take our marketplace, divide it up
into the various kinds of users, and have a better
understanding of what the use patterns are, what
product identities these various constituents
have, and how they use and evaluate services.'
It's not passive any longer. It's trying, in
effect as a major corporation would, to go out and
understand the market dynamics and position
products to fit the needs of those client
groupings. The data come from several places, not
the least of which are computer-aided dispatch
data, but from other information as well, perhaps
segmented surveys by different kinds of users."

Market demand. "How do we take market demand for
certain kinds of products and turn that into
something usable to the client group that will
consume it? All kinds of things are at stake here.
How is the service produced? I hear a lot about
interactions. How do police officers interact with
the public? What kinds of services does the public
expect to get? What kind of services do they get?
Are they the same, or are they divergent, and by
how much? Clearly interactional data--both
observational as well as self-reported on the part
of both the public and the police--can be used" in
these matters.

Work force. "We need to know something about the
work force. Very clearly the work force is acutely
at stake in a labor-intensive industry such as
policing. If we don't pay attention to all of the
nuances of organizational life, we don't really
know very much about why we produce better or less
better interactions out there. There is a huge
literature and very well rounded instrumentation
in the management and measurement of workforce
understandings. Do I know my boss? Do we get along
consensually? Do I believe in the rules? Do I feel
like I'm part of the process? There are hundreds
of standard instruments that can very easily and
fairly unobtrusively measure and monitor [the work
force] on a routine basis to get some sense for
the mental and social and communal health of
things within the police agency--that is, the
production force that's there."

Product line. "We sometimes have a
one-size-fits-all product with variations on a
theme: 'I'm going to arrest you, I'm not going to
arrest you, or I'm going to come back and arrest
you.' It seems to me that there's a wider range of
products than that. Certainly, problem-oriented
policing and other interventions have begun to
broaden the range of products that allow us to
both segment the market at the macro level but
also segment the product and line those products
up with the markets we are trying to produce some
response in."

Systems rates. "Systems rates are the normal
rhythm of the agency and the production of
whatever it is that it's producing, although in
justice issues I'm never sure quite what normal
represents and whether a high rate of something--
even though it's a constantly high rate--is
something that we want to achieve. But there is
the idea of systems-rates regularity. Monitoring
of all kinds of workflow processes within the
organization, as well as the mental health of the
workforce, is a way of establishing some baseline
information. That baseline information can then be
fed back into questions of quality assurance that
would get to some of the management issues that I
heard about in the integrity 
question."

Cost. "One piece that I find always fascinating in
major police agencies is cost. The unit cost of a
product becomes extremely important. We just
divide the workforce by the number of calls for
service and throw in the light bill and somehow
that produces a way to define costs. But there are
all kinds of costs, some of which are intended,
some unintended, and some of which are opportunity
costs--alternatives foregone because we invested
in other things."

Symbolic component of a product. "There's a part
of the product that is very difficult to get a
handle on, but it's very necessary. It's the
symbolic component of the product. I've heard a
lot about tangible calls for police service, about
crimes reported and not reported, and about the
monitoring of whether we can and do make
distinctions in domestic violence situations. I
think it's very important that we keep our pulse
on product identity, the symbolic component, the
people attached to that [the product] because it
defines a user base and support that will
ultimately affect the marketplace."

Product improvement. "There is a need to have a
system in place that will implement new methods,
evaluate those new methods, and use that
information to reinform both what can be produced
and what we will market to the marketplace as the
products of the police. Mostly all the
problem-oriented policing (POP) efforts and a lot
of the work that has been done in situational
crime prevention and community crime prevention
are about research and development activity within
policing that is reshaping the tools--that is,
using that information to reshape interventions--
to bring in different responses besides the
arrest, not-arrest, threaten-to-arrest response.
Those kinds of things are investments in the
long-term R&D [research and development] of this
industry called policing."

Test marketing. "We need to know about product
quality. There is test marketing going on here.
When a POP intervention goes on in a particular
community and there is an assessment of it, that
is the equivalent of test marketing a particular
idea. The presumption is that if you do that in
enough places with similar enough kinds of
circumstances, then we may actually create a new
technology to intervene in those [relevant] kinds
of situations. So it seems to me that evaluative
research, which was off the board, should come
back onto the board if [for] nothing else than to
inform the research and development curve of this
process."

Product information. "There's lots of information
that we don't know about because we don't monitor
or collect a lot of information as systematically
as we would like. You go into these places [police
departments], you talk to one unit, and they're
doing something that the rest of the department
has no idea is actually going on. So it seems to
me that knowing more about the product and
routinizing that product internally through
information that captures effort, workload, time
spent, and cost is very important. Virtually all
CAD systems with some reprogramming can capture
most of that, particularly time spent in
activities in multiple units. That's not to
undercut the importance of problem solving,
however. If you pursue the CAD response
independently, then problem solving begins to
trickle away from that process. That's why I say
problem solving is more in the research and
development category, which is a kind of new,
experimental way of understanding new tools."

Industry norm. "I know that this sometimes is not
the popular view, but it is important to compare
individual, discrete departments against some
industry norm. It will be very important to
establish what that industry norm is. That
industry norm will vary by size of the firm, by
regionality of the firm, by resources available to
the firm, by command of marketplace, by all of
those things that are reasonable for
differentiating these agencies. Simply to look at
17,000 places [police agencies] independently of
one another just begs the question. A lot of the
problems that [police departments have] are not
really that different from one place to another
despite the claim to uniqueness that one is first
met with at your chief's office."

Greene's remarks drew a variety of responses.

The Public Produces Safety

Michael Clark said he had "no problem with the
industry analogy and no problem with
market-oriented management." But, he added, "You
can't just view the public as consumers,
customers, recipients, clients. They are also
producers. They are people who produce safety in
their buildings, on their blocks, in their
neighborhoods, every day. When the police learn
how to use that energy and catch that wave, they
find their job is made much easier. Sometimes
that's hard to do because they don't know too much
about how communities are organized, but the
reality is that when they catch that wave and when
they work with it, they take a helluva lot longer
ride than when they go out and try to just sort of
plunge around thinking that the community has
thousands of disparate individuals."

Of Justice, Equity, and Safety

Warren Friedman, executive director of the Chicago
Alliance for Neighborhood Safety, said, "I think I
have a little more trouble than Mike does with the
industrial market analogy. . . . If I understood
you, Jack, the symbolic things were justice,
equity, and safety. To me, that's the product.
It's very hard to make something like justice,
equity, and safety similar to anything a business
produces. It is just absolutely different. A
business ultimately produces profit. Justice,
equity, and safety--if we're not getting
departments of government that help to produce
them--it seems to me we have a problem."

Neighborhoods Perform in Civic and Public Ways

David Duffee, professor of criminal justice at the
University at Albany, said he found "the market
analogies quite useful for some purposes. But the
police have to be aware of the extent to which
neighborhoods are capable of forming as
constituencies; that they perform in civic and
public ways. The police have to operate in a way--
and I think one can measure this--that is
sensitive to the ability of neighborhoods to act
that way. They have to be sensitive to the way in
which neighborhoods are organized and to some
extent will want to make sure that they don't
interfere with that organization and facilitate it
to the extent they can. Not that they should be in
charge of organizing neighborhoods. But they need
to work with the constituency groups that are
there."

A Public Agency Can't Be a Private Agency

Johnnie Johnson, chief of the Birmingham, Alabama,
Police Department, commented: "I want someone to
tell me how to be a better police agency within
the context of my environment. I am not so all
fire sure that I want to be a private business.
When you look at most police departments as being
very small, the conversation that we have going on
here is way up above their level of understanding.
You're not going to help them there. Somewhere
between where we are and where they are, we have
to find a place where it's going to be meaningful
and helpful to the people who we're trying to
affect.

"There are some successful businesses out there
that we can copy some things out of. However, we
can't make a government agency, a public agency,
into a private agency. There are too many
differences there to make that work.

"Marketplace? Product? What about my own words?
Why can't I use the words that I use now as a
police officer? Why do I have to change my
terminology to understand how to progress? I am
not saying there shouldn't be some systemic
changes, but do I have to completely be reborn in
order to be effective?"

-------------------------------------------------------

Perspectives on the Police

There are several perspectives from which to view
and measure the police. One is through the lens of
public opinion. "The police enjoy a robust vote of
confidence from most of the public," according to
Public Agenda, a nonpartisan research organization. 
"But support for law enforcement has a fault line. 
Far too many black Americans are disaffected and 
suspicious."

A conventional way of looking at the police is as
an integral part--along with prosecutors, courts,
and corrections--of the criminal justice system.
In this view, police are a kind of intake funnel
in the processing of criminal cases. But from a
different angle of vision, the police can be seen
as an agency of municipal government committed to
community problem solving, in the formulation of
Mark H. Moore, a professor at Harvard University's
Kennedy School of Government.

A third way to look at the police--particularly in
this era of community policing--is through the
eyes of community organizers. "One of the precepts
that should guide police work is to do things in
such a way that the community does for itself as
much as possible and thus develops the habits and
skills of doing," said Warren Friedman, executive
director of the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood
Safety, and Michael Clark, president of the
Citizens Committee for New York City.

The police also have perspectives on themselves
and their constituents. According to Johnnie
Johnson, Jr., chief of the Birmingham, Alabama,
Police Department, "Many people belong to internal
and external communities in their interactions
with law enforcement. These overlapping boundaries
include religion, social class, gender, ethnic
status, sexual preference, civic groups, and
education levels. None of these are our `bosses,'
but they all have an impact on the way we do our
jobs."

Chief Johnson's assessment was contained in a
paper written with the assistance of Chief Robert
Ford of the Port Orange, Florida, Police
Department and Chief Dennis Nowicki of the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Police
Department.

Another perspective comes from scholars who
examined the expectations of various police
constituencies and expectations that the police
have of these constituencies.

David Duffee, professor of criminal justice at the
University at Albany, wrote that the available
information "suggests that police spend more time
creating constituency support for their own
organizational needs in the general city
population than they do in facilitating
constituency behavior on behalf of neighborhoods."

Stuart Scheingold, professor of political science
at the University of Washington, wrote that "it is
inappropriate to assume that the fight against
crime will bring Americans together and that a
reduction in the crime rate is, therefore, a
sufficient gauge of successful policing."

The media provide another perspective on the
police. Most Americans "learn about crime and the
police from entertainment shows . . ., from the
police news roundup in their local newspaper, and
from the lead stories on the local TV station,"
according to Aric Press, a senior writer for
Newsweek, and Andrew Benson, a former reporter for
the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Their paper is
excerpted in a section entitled "The Police and
the News Media" (page 12).

The seven papers were prepared for the second of
the three "Measuring What Matters" meetings held
on May 13, 1996. They provided the framework for
daylong discussions focused on expectations of the
police by the general public, the media, community
organizations, local government, and other police
constituencies.

Some key points are excerpted here.

The Fault Line in Support of the Police

Relying on public opinion research, Jean Johnson,
director of programs for the New York City-based
Public Agenda, reported in her paper that:
    
"In a decade when many Americans seem to
think that "government" can do no right, law
enforcement is viewed as an essential public
service. In a decade when most Americans are
skeptical about government and many other social
institutions as well, the police enjoy a robust
vote of confidence from most of the public.
    
But support for law enforcement has a
fault line. Far too many black Americans are
disaffected and suspicious. They are not confident
that the police will be fair. They are not
confident that the police will be professional.
They are not confident that the police will
"protect and serve." And while the personal
encounters most whites have with police officers
may be positive, white Americans have now
witnessed two highly publicized and graphic
instances of police behavior (the Rodney King
beating and the attitudes associated with former
Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman) which, in
their view, is entirely unacceptable. They regard
these incidents as exceptions, but not exceptions
to be glossed over as "the cost of doing
business."

The Police as an Agency of Municipal Government

Mark Moore's paper called on the reader to
"imagine all the different ways in which the
police might contribute to the overall performance
of municipal government" and not only to "the just
and effective operations of the criminal justice
system." The police, thereby, could become "the
agency of city government responsible for
controlling and preventing crime, reducing fear,
and supporting both public and private agencies in
their important work." But this augmented role
would change significantly "our current
understanding of the mission, goals, and
objectives of the police." New capabilities would
be needed to measure this enlarged role.

"One such capability is a large, continuing
capacity to survey citizens," Moore wrote. For
example, there should be "a general population
survey that is designed to capture information
about (1) criminal victimization; (2) reasons for
not reporting crimes to the police; (3) general
attitudes toward the police; (4) levels of fear;
and (5) types of self-defense they rely on to
supplement the protection they get from the
police." Moore also suggested a customer survey
administered to a sample of persons who call the
police and even a survey of persons stopped or
arrested by the police. A second capability "the
police must develop is a continuing capacity to
evaluate their own proactive problem-solving
efforts."

Communities and the Police

Warren Friedman and Michael Clark offered several
guiding observations about communities and the
police.
    
"The importance of organizing and
organization cannot be overemphasized. The
community needs to be organized because it is the
most effective way to work with a highly organized
partner like the police and against often
well-organized and frightening adversaries.
    
[W]ithin a version of community policing
that assumes its distinctive strategy is a
problem-solving partnership, there are five
defining characteristics: It is (1) a coordinated
working relationship (partnership) between (2)
organized members of the community, the police,
other government agencies, and other institutions
to (3) solve chronic crime and disorder problems
at specific locations and to (4) secure reductions
and improvements by (5) increasing the community's
capacity to contest the recurrence of the
problems.
    
One of the precepts that should guide
police work is to do things in such a way that the
community does for itself as much as possible and
thus develops the habits and skills of doing."

The Way Police and Their Organizations Operate

Chief Johnnie Johnson's paper discussed the
public's lack of understanding of the police's
role.

"The public often does not understand, and
perhaps does not want to understand, the way
police and their organizations operate. Police
generally encounter people at their worst, not
their best. They are called to family fights, not
picnics. They see mostly the dark side of human
nature. Someone has to deal with the blood, the
hurt children, and the human anguish that no one
wants to face, and it is usually the police.
Certainly there is often mistrust and a "us-them"
attitude among police, which leads to a chasm in
police-community relationships."

-------------------------------------------------------

The Police and the News Media

Two enduring adversaries, the police and news
media, were the subject of recurring comment in
the second and third Measuring What Matters
sessions. Topics included the power of the news
media, how to deal with the media, and "How the
News Media Help Shape the Public's View of the
Police." The last topic was the title of a paper
contributed to the second session by Aric Press of
Newsweek and Andrew Benson, formerly a reporter
for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

It All Boils Down to the Media

"No matter what we come up with measurements, it
all boils down to what the media determines to be
important," Dennis Nowicki, chief of the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Police
Department, told the final session. "Somehow we
ought to be addressing the issue of the media in
our lives and in how it affects people's
understanding or feeling about what matters. You
could design these constructive measurements and
making outstanding progress in the right direction
over time and still be perceived by your
community, by your elected officials, and by
others as a terrible organization because of the
way the media portrays what's going on in your
community, in the way the media portrays your
organization."

Bring Them in for Briefings

"If you want the media to do something other than
'if it bleeds, it leads,' which is what they do
now, you have got to bring them for background
briefings; you have got to start talking to them
about the data sets that you're developing and the
directions you're going and the kind of work
you're doing, and you're not going to see a fast
payoff," according to Michael Clark, president of
the Citizens Committee for New York City.
"Investments by definition take time. You're going
to see over time a qualitative shift, under the
best of circumstances anyway, in the kind of
reporting you get. You're not going to control the
media, but you do in fact influence their thinking
if you work with them on a regular basis."

Police Data Is News

Andrew Benson, who is now president of the New
Ohio Institute in Toledo, Ohio, said, "Chiefs
should remember that they have a lot of power in
that they have at their control data. Data is
news. How you shape the data--honestly, obviously-
-can have enormous impact. Right now, you're
sending out [possible] failures--crime statistics,
response times easily available on CAD. If you say
[other things are] important for these reasons,
and I'm releasing them, the media will pick it
up." He also advised, "Build partnerships with the
community, build alliances; then you have
strength, you have support, when things are
happening. The media will listen to you."

Cops and Reporters--Us and Them

The paper by Aric Press and Andrew Benson examined
in succinct terms police-news media relations and
the perception and reality of crime.
    
"The police want "good" press. By that they
mean favorable reports that emphasize bravery in
the field and wisdom at headquarters. Good press
is also the absence of bad press. Bad press in
this context describes abuse, corruption, and
other mistakes.
    
Cops, like reporters, see the world as
divided into two parts--Us and Them. Rather than
leading to a mature understanding of each other's
roles, these attitudes can lead to hostility.
    
[Through the efforts of the news media]
what is the impression left on the public of the
police? It is an agency that announces crimes,
makes arrests, has a few ideas, struggles with
labor-management issues, suffers from some
corruption, employs a few brutal officers who may
or may not live within the jurisdiction, and
appears to be led by a succession of well-meaning
administrators who do not seem to last very long."

The Reality and Perception of Crime
    
For most Americans, the reality of crime
is what they see on television or at the movies
and what they read in the newspaper or in a
magazine. An overwhelming majority of citizens
report they have not been a crime victim in the
past year nor do they know anyone who has been a
crime victim. . . .
    
The research seems clear that the news
media have pervasive, unintended, and
unpredictable influences on public opinion. . . .
The evidence also strongly suggests that the
steady stream of crime news from the media affects
the public, such as they are more fearful about
the risks of crime than need be and are more
likely to demand punitive criminal justice to
control crime. . . .
    
The demand by the public for a specific
response to crime is likely to lead policymakers
to heed the public or, at the very least, to make
it more difficult for policymakers to get support
for responses that are counter to public 
opinion.... 

As a way to address the negative effects
of news media accounts, criminologists and
journalists have called for more context in crime
stories. . . . By tying in the trends, patterns,
and causes of crimes, the public would get a
better picture of what crime is occurring, where
it is occurring, and how often. That gives them
information by which they can make informed
decisions about their personal safety.

This should lead criminologists and police
administrators toward providing more of the
statistics and research data to the public through
the news media. . . . It makes sense that crime
news be accompanied by statistical data or
inferences from administrators that bring context
and order to the seemingly unconnected series of
crime and violence emanating from television and
newspapers."

-------------------------------------------------------

A Police Chief on Police Data

"I should warn you that while 80 percent of the 
departments have computer-assisted dispatch, only 
about 50 percent of them work.

"The state of police data out there is horrible, 
particularly in terms of their ability to manipulate
it. One of the things to think seriously about for a lot 
of departments is assisting them in improving their 
data analysis capability.

The second point is going to be contrary to what I just 
said . . . It's amazing how robust information is in the 
system. If you try and collect it a little, you're going
to get a good feel for what the public wants. They're not 
quiet about it. You're going to get a good sense of what 
neighborhoods have problems and the like. 
"I think we can get away with a lot lower level of
measurement and still have dramatic impacts. I don't 
think it has to be that perfect. We can do a helluva
lot better than we're doing now because the information 
there, it's retrievable, it may not be as elegant as we 
could want, but even nonelegant data will work a lot 
for us."

--Chief Robert Ford, Port Orange, Florida, Police 
Department

-------------------------------------------------------

Screwing Up Your Context

". . . [A]bout the things the police can't do anything
about but need to know about. You need to be aware 
of policies that are working against your police goals.
Obviously, the government is responsible for a number
of those. If you're trying to clean up and put order back
into a public housing project, the fact that the banking
industry is working against you is no help whatsoever.
Somehow in terms of knowing context, you have to 
know about other policies that are screwing up your 
context."

--David E. Duffee, professor of criminal justice at 
the University at Albany.

-------------------------------------------------------

Consumer Measures of Police Effectiveness

There is "a growing need for independent 
consumer measures of the effectiveness of the
police. Most of the measurement talked about
here assumes that the people analyzing the 
measurements are managers. Being a manager, 
I can appreciate that. That is a valuable and
important task. But an equally important task is
for a kind of Consumer Reports version of that 
same information that monitors the quality of
police service and gives the public an opportunity
to develop a learning curve of its own about what
is good policing.

"We have done a rotten job of marketing 
community policing both to the public and to
police officers in the sense of a clear, simple,
day-to-day notion of what to expect from the
police and what to expect from citizens to make
it work.

"On the community assessment side, it's very
important that we be careful not to jump whole
hog into a kind of pathology model. We are 
ourselves increasingly looking at community 
assets and at community asset assessment along
with problem assessment. It's quite important
that we not in a subliminal way transmit a message
that communities with lots of crime problems are
somehow inherently pathological."

--Michael Clark, president of the Citizens Committee
for New York City

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Fair Warning Notice

"Measurement is an activity so fraught with 
mind- and soul-wrenching difficulties that only
grossly ignorant beginning students and the least 
capable or least virtuous of social scientists engage
in it with good humor.

"Fair warning is thus in order to any police 
practitioner who is approached by a quantitative
criminologist with a smile on his face:

"Listen very carefully, keeping one hand on your
wallet and the other on your gun."

--Criminologist Carl B. Klockars, in discussing
measuring what matters, issued what he called a 
"fair warning notice."

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Papers prepared for this and the other Policing
Research Institute meetings are scheduled to be
published in book-length form by NIJ.

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Selected NIJ Publications About Policing

Listed below are some recent NIJ publications
related to issues of policing. These products are
free and can be obtained from the National
Criminal Justice Reference Service: telephone 800-
851-3420, e-mail askncjrs@ncjrs.org, or write
NCJRS, P.O. Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20849-6000.

These documents can be viewed online at the
Justice Information Center World Wide Web site at
http://www.ncjrs.org.

Please note that when free publications are out of
stock, they are available as photocopies or
through interlibrary loan.

Brady, Thomas V., Measuring What Matters: Part
One: Measures of Crime, Fear, and Disorder,
Research in Action, a joint publication of the
National Institute of Justice and the Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services, 1996, NCJ
162205.

Building Knowledge About Crime and Justice: The
1997 Research Prospectus of the National Institute
of Justice, 1997, NCJ 163708.

Criminal Justice Research Under the Crime Act--
1995 to 1996, Research Report, 1997, NCJ 166142.

Dunworth, Terence, Peter Haynes, and Aaron J.
Saiger, National Assessment of the Byrne Formula
Grant Program, Research in Brief, 1997, NCJ
162203.

Feins, Judith D., Joel C. Epstein, and Rebecca
Widom, Solving Crime Problems in Residential
Neighborhoods: Comprehensive Changes in Design,
Management, and Use, Issues and Practices, 1997,
NCJ 164488. 

Finn, Peter, and Julie Esselman Tomz, Developing a
Law Enforcement Stress Program for Officers and
Their Families, Issues and Practices, 1997, NCJ
163175.

Fleissner, Dan, and Fred Heinzelmann, Crime
Prevention Through Environmental Design and
Community Policing, Research in Action, 1996, NCJ
157308.

Gaffigan, Stephen J., and Phyllis P. McDonald,
Police Integrity: Public Service With Honor,
Research Report, a joint publication of the
National Institute of Justice and the Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services, 1997, NCJ
163811.

Garner, Joel, John Buchanan, Tom Schade, and John
Hepburn, Understanding the Use of Force By and
Against the Police, Research in Brief, 1996, NCJ
158614.

Lively, G. Martin, and Judy A. Reardon, Justice on
the Net: The National Institute of Justice
Promotes Internet Services, Research in Action,
1996, NCJ 158838.

Mastrofski, Stephen D., et al., Law Enforcement in
a Time of Community Policing, Research Preview,
1996, FS 000149.

Mills, Gregory, COMmunity-Backed Anti-drug Tax:
COMBAT in Jackson County, Missouri, Program Focus,
1996, NCJ 160937.

Policing in Emerging Democracies: Workshop Papers
and Highlights, Research Report, a joint
publication of the National Institute of Justice
and the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement Affairs, 1997, NCJ 167024.

Rich, Thomas F., The Chicago Police Department's
Information Collection for Automated Mapping
(ICAM) Program, Program Focus, 1996, NCJ 160764.

Roehl, Janice A., et al., National Process
Evaluation of Operation Weed and Seed, Research in
Brief, 1996, NCJ 161624.

Sadd, Susan, and Randolph M. Grinc, Implementation
Challenges in Community Policing: Innovative
Neighborhood-Oriented Policing in Eight Cities,
Research in Brief, 1996, NCJ 157932.

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This publication was prepared by Thomas V. Brady
who is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and editor 
specializing in criminal and civil justice matters.

Findings and conclusions reported here are those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official position or policies of the U.S. Department 
of Justice.

The National Institute of Justice is a component
of the Office of Justice Programs, which also
includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and
the Office for Victims of Crime.

NCJ 167255

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