New Perspectives in Policing

Executive Session on Policing and 

Public Safety

This is one in a series of papers that will be 

published as a result of the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety. 

Harvard’s Executive Sessions are a convening 

of individuals of independent standing who take 

joint responsibility for rethinking and improving 

society’s responses to an issue. Members

are selected based on their experiences, their 

reputation for thoughtfulness and their potential 

for helping to disseminate the work of the Session. 

In the early 1980s, an Executive Session on Policing 

helped resolve many law enforcement issues of 

the day. It produced a number of papers and 

concepts that revolutionized policing. Thirty 

years later, law enforcement has changed and 

NIJ and the Harvard Kennedy School are again 

collaborating to help resolve law enforcement 

issues of the day. 

Learn more about the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety at: 

www.NIJ.gov, keywords “Executive Session 

Policing”

www.hks.harvard.edu, keywords “Executive 

Session Policing”

V E R I TAS

HARVARD Kennedy School

Program in Criminal Justice

Policy and Management National Institute of Justice

MARCH 2015
 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization 

Malcolm K. Sparrow 

Introduction 

Perhaps everything the modern police executive 

needs to know about performance measurement 

has already been written. But much of the best 

work on the subject is both voluminous and now 

more than a decade old, so there is no guarantee 

that today’s police executives have read it. Indeed, it 

appears that many police organizations have not yet 

taken some of its most important lessons to heart. 

I hope, in this paper, to offer police executives 

some broad frameworks for recognizing the 

value of police work, to point out some common 

mistakes regarding performance measurement, 

and to draw police executives’ attention to key 

pieces of literature that they might not have 

explored and may find useful. I also hope to 

bring to the police profession some of the general 

lessons learned in other security and regulatory 

professions about the special challenges of 

performance measurement in a risk-control or 

harm-reduction setting. 

A research project entitled “Measuring What 

Matters,” funded jointly by the National Institute 

of Justice (NIJ) and the Office of Community 

Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office), led 
 

2 | New Perspectives in Policing 

to the publication in July 1999 of a substantial 

collection of essays on the subject of measuring 

performance.1 The 15 essays that make up that 

collection are fascinating, not least for the 

divergence of opinion they reveal among the 

experts of the day. The sharpest disagreements 

pit the champions of the New York Police 

Department’s (NYPD’s) early CompStat model 

(with its rigorous and almost single-minded 

focus on reductions in reported crime as the 

“bottom line” of policing) against a broad range 

of scholars who mostly espoused more expansive 

conceptions of the policing mission and pressed 

the case for more inclusive and more nuanced 

approaches to performance measurement. 

Three years later, in 2002, the Police Executive 

Research Forum (PERF) published another 

major report on performance measurement, 

Recognizing Value in Policing: The Challenge 

of Recognizing Police Performance, authored 

principally by Mark H. Moore.2

 PERF followed 

that up in 2003 with a condensed document, The 

“Bottom Line” of Policing: What Citizens Should 

Value (and Measure!) in Police Performance,

3 

authored by Moore and Anthony Braga. 

Despite the richness of the frameworks presented 

in these and other materials, a significant 

proportion of today’s police organizations 

seem to remain narrowly focused on the same 

categories of indicators that have dominated the 

field for decades: 

(a) Reductions in the number of serious crimes 

reported, most commonly presented as 

local comparisons against an immediately 

preceding time period. 

(b) Clearance rates. 

(c) Response times. 

(d) Measures of enforcement productivity (e.g., 

numbers of arrests, citations or stop-and-frisk 

searches). 

Cite this paper as: Rahr, Sue and Stephen K. Rice. From Warriors to Guardians: 

Recommitting American Police Culture to Democratic Ideals. New Perspectives 

in Policing Bulletin. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National 

Institute of Justice, 2015. NCJ 248654. 

A few departments now use citizen satisfaction 

surveys on a regular basis, but most do not. 

Clearance rates are generally difficult to measure 

in a standardized and objective fashion, so 

category (b) tends to receive less emphasis than 

the other three. Categories (c) and (d) — response 

times and enforcement productivity metrics — 

are useful in showing that police are getting to 

calls fast and working hard but reveal nothing 

about whether they are working intelligently, 

using appropriate methods or having a positive 

impact. 

Therefore, category (a) — reductions in the 

number of serious crime reports — tends to 

dominate many departments’ internal and 

external claims of success, being the closest 

thing available to a genuine crime-control 

outcome measure. These measures have retained 

their prominence despite everything the field is 

supposed to have learned in the last 20 years 

about the limitations of reported crime statistics. 

Those limitations (which this paper will explore in 

greater detail later) include the following: 
Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 3 

(1) The focus is narrow because crime control is just 

one of several components of the police mission. 

(2) The focus on serious crimes is narrower still, as 

community concerns often revolve around other 

problems and patterns of behavior. 

(3) Relentless pressure to lower the numbers, 

without equivalent pressure to preserve the 

integrity of the recording and reporting systems, 

invites manipulation of crime statistics — 

suppression of reports and misclassification of 

crimes — and other forms of corruption. 

(4) Focusing on reported crime overlooks 

unreported crimes. Overall levels of 

victimization are generally two to three times 

higher than reported crime rates.4 Particularly 

low reporting rates apply to household thefts, 

rape, other sexual assaults, crimes against 

youths ages 12 to 17, violent crimes committed 

at schools, and crimes committed by someone 

the victim knows well.5 

(5) P r e s s u r e 	 t o r e d u c e t h e n u m b e r s i s 

counterproductive when dealing with invisible 

crimes (classically unreported or underreported 

crimes, such as crimes within the family, white 

collar crimes, consensual crimes such as 

drug dealing or bribery, and crimes involving 

intimidation). Successful campaigns against 

these types of crime often involve deliberate 

attempts to expose the problem by first driving 

reporting rates up, not down.6 

(6) A focus on crime rate reductions does not 

consider the costs or side effects of the strategies 

used to achieve them. 

(7) Emphasizing comparisons with prior time 

periods affords a short-term and very local 

perspective. It may give a department the 

chance to boast, even while its crime rates 

remain abysmal compared with other 

jurisdictions. Conversely, best performers (with 

low crime rates overall) might look bad when 

random fluctuations on a quarterly or annual 

basis raise their numbers. Genuine longer term 

trends may be masked by temporary changes, 

such as those caused by weather patterns or 

special events. More important than local 

short-term fluctuations are sustained longer 

term trends and comparisons with crime rates 

in similar communities. Pressure to beat one’s 

own performance, year after year, can produce 

bizarre and perverse incentives. 

(8) Even if crime levels were once out of control, 

the reductions achievable will inevitably run 

out eventually, when rates plateau at more 

acceptable levels. At this point, the department’s 

normal crime-control success story — assuming 

that reductions in reported crime rates had been 

its heart and soul — evaporates. Some executives 

fail to recognize the point at which legitimate 

reductions have been exhausted. Continuing to 

demand reductions at that point is like failing to 

set the torque control on a power screwdriver: 

first you drive the screw, which is useful work; 

but then you rip everything to shreds and even 

undo the value of your initial tightening. The 

same performance focus that initially produced 

legitimate gains becomes a destructive force if 

pressed too hard or for too long. 
 

 

4 | New Perspectives in Policing 

(9) A number is just a number, and reliance on it 

reduces all the complexity of real life to a zero 

or a one. One special crime, or one particular 

crime unsolved, may have a disproportionate 

impact on a community’s sense of safety and 

security. Aggregate numbers fail to capture 

the significance of special cases. 

Reported crime rates will always belong among 

the suite of indicators relevant for managing a 

complex police department, as will response 

times, clearance rates, enforcement productivity, 

community satisfaction and indicators of morale. 

But what will happen if police executives stress 

one or another of these to the virtual exclusion of 

all else? What will happen if relentless pressure 

is applied to lower the reported crime rate, but 

no counterbalancing controls are imposed on 

methods, the use of force, or the integrity of 

the recording and reporting systems? From the 

public’s perspective, the resulting organizational 

behaviors can be ineffective, inappropriate and 

even disastrous. 

If we acknowledged the limitations of reported 

crime rates and managed to lessen our 

dependence on them, then how would we 

recognize true success in crime control? And how 

might we better capture and describe it? 

I believe the answer is the same across the 

f ull range of government’s risk-cont rol 

responsibilities, whether the harms to be 

controlled are criminal victimization, pollution, 

corruption, fraud, tax evasion, terrorism or other 

potential and actual harms. The definition of 

success in risk control or harm reduction is to 

spot emerging problems early and suppress them 

before they do much harm.7 This is a very different 

idea from “allow problems to grow so hopelessly 

out of control that we can then get serious, all of a 

sudden, and produce substantial reductions year 

after year after year.” 

What do citizens expect of government agencies 

entrusted with crime control, risk control, or 

other harm-reduction duties? The public does not 

expect that governments will be able to prevent 

all crimes or contain all harms. But they do 

expect government agencies to provide the best 

protection possible, and at a reasonable price, by 

being: 

(a) Vigilant, so they can spot emerging threats 

early, pick up on precursors and warning 

signs, use their imaginations to work out what 

could happen, use their intelligence systems 

to discover what others are planning, and do 

all this before much harm is done. 

(b) Nimble, flexible enough to organize 

themselves quickly and appropriately around 

each emerging crime pattern rather than 

being locked into routines and processes 

designed for traditional issues. 

(c) Skillful, masters of the entire intervention 

toolkit, experienced (as craftsmen) in 

picking the best tools for each task, and 

adept at inventing new approaches when 

existing methods turn out to be irrelevant or 

insufficient to suppress an emerging threat.8 

Real success in crime control — spotting 

emerging crime problems early and suppressing 
 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 5 

them before they do much harm — would not 

produce substantial year-to-year reductions in 

crime figures because genuine and substantial 

reductions are available only when crime 

problems have first grown out of control. Neither 

would best practices produce enormous numbers 

of arrests, coercive interventions or any other 

specific activity because skill demands economy 

in the use of force and financial resources and 

rests on artful and well-tailored responses rather 

than extensive and costly campaigns. 

Ironically, therefore, the two classes of metrics 

that still seem to wield the most influence in 

many departments — crime reduction and 

enforcement productivity — would utterly fail to 

reflect the very best performance in crime control. 

Furthermore, we must take seriously the fact 

that other important duties of the police will 

never be captured through crime statistics or 

in measures of enforcement output. As NYPD 

Assistant Commissioner Ronald J. Wilhelmy 

wrote in a November 2013 internal NYPD strategy 

document: 

[W]e cannot continue to evaluate 

personnel on the simple measure of 

whether crime is up or down relative to a 

prior period. Most importantly, CompStat 

has ignored measurement of other core 

functions. Chiefly, we fail to measure 

what may be our highest priority: public 

satisfaction. We also fail to measure 

quality of life, integrity, community 

relations, administrative efficiency, and 

employee satisfaction, to name just a few 

other important areas.9 

Who Is Flying This Airplane, and What 

Kind of Training Have They Had? 

At the most recent meeting of the Executive 

Session, we asked the police chiefs present, “Do 

you think your police department is more or less 

complicated than a Boeing 737?” (see photograph 

of Boeing 737 cockpit). They all concluded fairly 

quickly that they considered their departments 

more complicated and put forward various 

reasons. 

First, their departments were made up mostly of 

people, whom they regarded as more complex 

and difficult to manage than the electrical, 

mechanical, hydraulic and software systems that 

make up a modern commercial jetliner. 

Second, they felt their departments’ missions 

were multiple and ambiguous, rather than single 

and clear. Picking Denver as a prototypical flight 

destination, they wondered aloud, “What’s the 

equivalent of Denver for my police department?” 

Given a destination, flight paths can be mapped 

out in advance and scheduled within a minute, 

even across the globe. Unless something strange 

or unusual happens along the way, the airline pilot 

(and most likely an autopilot) follows the plan. For 

police agencies, “strange and unusual” is normal. 

Unexpected events happen all the time, often 

shifting a department’s priorities and course. As 

a routine matter, different constituencies have 

different priorities, obliging police executives to 

juggle conflicting and sometimes irreconcilable 

demands. 
 

6 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Photograph of Boeing 737 Cockpit
 

Source: Photograph by Christiaan van Heijst, www.jpcvanheijst.com, used with permission.
 

Assuming that for these or other reasons, the 

answer is “more complicated,” then we might 

want to know how the training and practices 

of police executives compare with those of 

commercial pilots when it comes to using 

information in managing their enterprise. 

The pilot of a Boeing 737 has access to at least 50 

types of information on a continuing basis. Not 

all of them require constant monitoring, as some 

of the instruments in the cockpit beep or squeak 

or flash when they need attention. At least 10 to 

12 types of information are monitored constantly. 

What do we expect of pilots? That they know, 

through their training, how to combine different 

types of information and interpret them in 

context, so they can quickly recognize important 

conditions of the plane and of the environment 

and know how they should respond. 

A simple question like, “Am I in danger of 

stalling?” (i.e., flying too slowly to retain control 

of the aircraft) requires at least seven types of 

information to resolve: altitude, air temperature, 

windspeed, engine power, flap deployment, 

weight and weight distribution, together with 

knowledge of the technical parameters that 

determine the edge of the flight envelope. Some of 

these factors relate to the plane, and some relate 

to external conditions. All these indicators must 

be combined to identify a potential stall. 
 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 7 

Thanks to the availability of simulators, 

commercial airline pilots are now trained to 

recognize and deal with an amazing array of 

possible scenarios, many of which they will never 

encounter in real life.10 They learn how various 

scenarios would manifest themselves through a 

variety of indicators, so they can recognize them 

quickly, diagnose them accurately and respond 

appropriately. 

With so many forms of information available to 

the pilot, we might wonder how many of the dials 

in the cockpit are designated key performance 

indicators or, for that matter, how many of them 

are regarded as performance indicators at all. The 

answer is none. No single dial in the cockpit tells 

the pilot how well he or she is doing or is used 

to judge performance. Airline pilots appreciate 

and use an extensive array of different types of 

information, habitually use them in combination 

and in relation to one another, but are very slow to 

label any of them performance indicators. 

By contrast, many public sector agencies 

(and this problem is by no means confined 

to police departments) pay close attention to 

a comparatively small number of indicators 

and seem all too keen to select one or two 

of them (usually no more than five) as key 

performance indicators. Designating a measure 

as a performance indicator usually means 

we determine in advance whether we expect 

it to move up or down, and we may even set 

a particular level as a target. Public sector 

executives then often seem surprised when 

the narrow range of information monitored 

produces partial or inadequate interpretations 

of what is really happening and when the narrow 

performance focus drives behaviors that turn out 

to be perverse and contrary to the public interest. 

Executive Session participants were quick 

to point out the lack of “simulator training” 

currently available for senior police managers. 

Simulations in the form of practical exercises are 

frequently used in entry-level training for recruits 

and in training courses for specialty functions 

(e.g., hostage negotiations, SWAT). For executives, 

simulator-style training is occasionally available 

in crisis leadership courses, where trainees are 

invited to take their turn at the helm in a crisis 

response exercise. But absent a crisis, most 

executive teams operate without any special 

training to help them interpret the myriad signals 

available or recognize important conditions 

quickly and pick the best response to different 

scenarios. 

In the absence of such training, many executive 

teams muddle through, having learned most of 

what they know through their own experience 

on the way up through the managerial ranks 

rather than through formal training. As one 

chief noted, the closest equivalent to executivelevel simulator training is when one department 

has the opportunity to learn from the misery of 

another. A collegial network of police executives, 

ready to share both their successes and failures, 

is a valuable asset to the profession. 

Any “numbers game” is, of course, a simplification. 

Carl Klockars expresses this beautifully (and with 

a nod to Arthur “Dooley” Wilson) in Measuring 

What Matters: 
8 | New Perspectives in Policing 

SCENARIOS FOR POLICE EXECUTIVES 

Imagining a simulator for police executives might be 

interesting. Here are three scenarios: 

(1) You notice the following: 

(a) The conviction rate for cases prosecuted is
 

unusually low and falling.
 

(b) The proportion of complaints against officers that 

are internally generated is rising. 

(c) The number of internal requests for transfers is 

unusually high, as is the use of sick days. 

(d)Based on community surveys, public confidence 

in the agency is rising, but the response rate on 

surveys is falling. 

(e)The reported crime rate is dropping fast. 

What is happening? What else would you want to 

know? What might you do? 

(2) You notice the following: 

(a) Drug-related arrests are up 30 percent over last year. 

(b) The department has just (proudly) announced 

“record drug seizures” for the last quarter. 

(c) The proportion of drug-related prosecutions that 

result in jail terms has fallen to record low levels. 

(d)Street-level drug prices are at record lows. 

What is happening? What else would you want to 

know? What might you do? 

(3) You notice the following: 

(a) The number of domestic violence calls received by the 

department has risen sharply over the last 6 months. 

(b) The number of homicides determined to be 

domestic violence-related has dropped by onethird in the same period. 

(c) The proportion of domestic violence arrests 

that result in charges has just dropped below 40 

percent for the first time. 

(d)The proportion of domestic violence cases 


prosecuted that result in convictions has also
 

fallen below 70 percent for the first time.
 

What is happening? What else would you want to 

know? What might you do? 

These three scenarios were presented to the 

Executive Session in the context of our discussions on 

performance measurement. Given the time limitations, 

we did not have the chance to explore them at length, 

and none of the police leaders present ventured 

an opinion as to what he or she thought might be 

happening in each case. But they did agree that they 

would quite likely reach very different conclusions from 

one another, given their varied experiences and biases. 

These scenarios are relatively simple ones involving only 

four or five indicators. Even so, using these indicators 

in combination and treating them as important 

management information might lead one to very 

different conclusions than treating one or another of 

them as a performance metric and specifying whether it 

should move up or down or reach some target level. 

Scenario 1 might reveal an agency in crisis with 

plummeting morale. The community may be giving 

up on the police, no longer bothering to report crimes. 

Only “friends of the department” bother to respond to 

surveys; everyone else has given up on them. Corruption 

problems may be surfacing, evidenced by a higher rate of 

internally generated complaints and loss of cases in court, 

perhaps due to tainted evidence or community distrust. 

Scenario 2 might suggest a failing drug-control 

strategy, with numerous arrests exhausting the 

capacity of the justice system but no positive or 

structural impact on the drug problem. 

Scenario 3 might reveal the early stages of an 

energetic and successful campaign against domestic 

violence, which is helping to expose the problem 

more effectively while using arrests and prosecutions 

aggressively as deterrence tactics (even if prosecutions 

are not taken all the way through the system). 

Notice that the two scenarios suggesting various forms 

of failure and trouble (1 and 2) show a reduction in 

reported crime rates (traditionally regarded as a sign of 

success). One of them (scenario 2) shows high levels of 

enforcement productivity. 

The only story here that suggests an effective crimecontrol strategy (scenario 3) shows an increase in 

reported crime rates and a decrease in the conviction 

rate (traditionally signals of poor performance). 

Even these relatively straightforward examples show 

how too close a focus on one or two classes of metric 

could blind an organization to meaning and context 

and possibly mislead everyone about what is really 

happening. 
Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 9 

In every instance of measurement, the 

conversion of a thing, event, or occasion 

to a number requires ignoring or 

discarding all other meaning that thing, 

event, or occasion might have. The easy 

way to appreciate this very hard point in 

all its paradox and irony is to remember 

this: a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a 

sigh, and a crime is just a crime, as 

time goes by. (Which, of course, anyone 

who has kissed, sighed, or committed, 

investigated, or been the victim of a 

crime knows is not true.)11 

Filmmakers and writers of police television 

dramas seem to have picked up on the collision 

that happens, somewhere in the middle ranks 

of a police department, between high-level 

general strategies (often numbers driven) and the 

rich texture of real life. It does not really matter 

whether one is watching Detective McNulty in 

“The Wire,” Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle 

in “Foyle’s War,” or any other fictional midrank 

police officer. 

At some point or another, in most episodes, an 

assistant commissioner or some other senior 

officer is going to show up unexpectedly at the 

local police station. Never is his visit good news! 

The senior officers are invariably portrayed as 

interfering nitwits, ignorant and dismissive 

of what is happening at the street level. Often, 

they appear with their own new pet initiatives, 

requiring this many cases to be made or that 

many arrests of a particular type. Their agendas 

seem motivated by political, personal or 

career-enhancing imperatives or are blatantly 

corrupt. The senior officers never listen and never 

help, but walk in with their general solutions that 

are not well thought out and demand a campaign 

of arrests or prosecutions that they claim will 

serve as a visible public demonstration of how 

seriously the department takes such-and-such 

an issue. Such visits interrupt valuable work and 

create imperatives for frontline officers that seem 

unhelpful, absurd or not in the public interest. 

Morale suffers, and the star of the show is left to 

fend off the ridiculous pressures from above so 

that his or her subordinates can carry on with 

“real police work,” knowing full well it will never 

be recognized by the department. 

Of course, incompetent and corrupt senior 

management always makes for good theater. 

But the creators of police dramas do seem to 

have picked up on a specific organizational 

dynamic relevant to policing. The episode is 

about a specific scenario, which has all the quirky 

peculiarities of real life. That is what makes each 

episode unique, interesting and worth watching. 

The senior officers are unflatteringly portrayed 

as besotted with a general strategy and a narrow 

performance focus, neither of which does justice 

to the complex and varied nature of police work. 

If a department appreciates that complexity; 

does well on vigilance, nimbleness, and skill; and 

therefore excels at spotting emerging problems 

early and suppressing them before they do much 

harm, what will success look like? How will such 

a department demonstrate its crime-control 

expertise? 
10 | New Perspectives in Policing 

The answer is that its performance account 

will consist largely of problem-specific project 

accounts describing emerging crime patterns 

and what happened to each one. Each project 

account will describe how the department 

spotted the problem in the first place, how it 

analyzed and subsequently understood the 

problem, what the department and its partners 

did about the problem, and what happened as a 

result. Some in policing call that the scanning, 

analysis, response and assessment (SARA) model. 

It is a straightforward, problem-oriented account 

that has little to do with aggregate numbers of any 

particular kind. 

Broader Frameworks for Monitoring 

and Measurement 

If the analogy of the cockpit turns out to be 

useful, then the following sections may help 

senior managers develop a broader sense of the 

banks of instruments they might want to have 

available in their cockpits and a clearer sense 

of how to use them for different purposes. To 

understand the diversity of indicators that could 

be relevant and useful in a police department’s 

cockpit, we should remember (1) the breadth of 

the policing mission, (2) the multiple dimensions 

of performance that are therefore relevant, (3) the 

different managerial purposes that measurement 

can serve, and (4) the different types of work that 

occur within an agency, each of which naturally 

generates different types of information. 

Much literature is available on all of these 

subjects, but for the sake of efficiency here I will 

refer readers to one principal author for each: 

Herman Goldstein, for breadth of mission;12 Mark 

Moore, for multiple dimensions of performance;13 

Robert Behn, for different managerial purposes;14 

and my own work on operational risk control for 

different types of work.15 

Broadening the Frame: The Mission of Policing 

In his 1977 book, Policing a Free Society, Herman 

Goldstein summarized the functions of the 

police:16 

(1) To prevent and control conduct widely 

recognized as threatening to life and property 

(serious crime). 

(2) To aid individuals who are in danger of 

physical harm, such as the victims of criminal 

attacks. 

(3) To protect constitutional guarantees such as 

the right of free speech and assembly. 

(4) To facilitate the movement of people and 

vehicles. 

(5) To assist those who cannot care for themselves: 

the intoxicated, the addicted, the mentally ill, 

the physically disabled, the old and the young. 

(6) To resolve conflict, whether between 

individuals, groups of individuals, or 

individuals and their government. 

(7) To identify problems that have the potential to 

become more serious for the individual citizen, 

the police or the government. 

(8) To create and maintain a feeling of security in 

the community. 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 11 

This template, now 37 years old, seems a solid 

place to start and perfectly usable today as a 

frame for describing the multiple components 

of the police mission. Each of the eight areas 

Goldstein mentions might constitute one chapter 

in a police department’s annual report. Perhaps, 

at the outset, the first chapter (crime control) 

might be more thickly populated than some of 

the others, but with some effort a better balance 

might be achieved. 

Goldstein’s framework pushes police to view 

their role more broadly than as part of the 

criminal justice system. The community policing 

movement and the evolution of CompStat systems 

into broader CitiStat systems17 have pushed police 

departments farther in recognizing their role 

as a part of municipal government. As Moore 

and Poethig point out in their Measuring What 

Matters essay: 

If we conceive of the police as nothing 

more than “the first step in the criminal 

justice system,” then we might easily 

miss the contributions that they make 

“outside the box” of crime control, law 

enforcement, and arresting people. 

On the other hand, if we conceive of 

the police as an agency of municipal 

government that shares with other 

agencies the broad responsibility for 

strengthening the quality of urban life, 

then we are in a better position to notice 

that the police contribute much more to 

those goals than is captured by the simple 

idea of reducing crime. We also notice 

that the police have capabilities that go 

far beyond their ability to make arrests 

and that these capabilities are valuable 

to the enterprise of city government. In 

short, the police are a more valuable 

asset when viewed from the vantage 

point of trying to strengthen urban life 

than they are when viewed from the 

narrower perspective of reducing crime 

through making arrests.18 

An obvious example of this broader role, as Moore 

and Poethig point out, is emergency response: 

[P]artly because the police department 

is the only agency that works 24 hours 

a day, 7 days a week, and makes house 

calls, police will continue to be the 

“first responders” to a wide variety of 

emergencies. These emergencies can be 

medical (although ambulance services 

increasingly take care of these) or they 

can be social, such as deranged people 

threatening themselves or others, 

homeless children found wandering the 

streets with no parents to care for them, 

or drunks at risk of freezing to death after 

falling asleep on a park bench.19 

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, 

brought another kind of multiagency network 

to the fore. Police departments, especially those 

in major cities, were now required (and with 

no diminution of their other responsibilities) 

to participate in a range of counterterrorism, 

domestic security and intelligence collaborations 

at regional, national and international levels. 

Reporting systems that focused too heavily on 
 

 

12 | New Perspectives in Policing 

local crime statistics would likely overlook their 

contributions on this front. Of course, much 

of the work conducted in the security domain 

cannot be discussed in public as readily as 

routine crime-control activities. Nevertheless, 

it would be a shame not to include this aspect 

of the modern police mission in a department’s 

performance account, even if parts of the story 

could be presented only to those stakeholders 

authorized to hear it. 

Broadening the Frame: Dimensions of 

Performance 

Work ing f rom Goldstein’s (and ot her 

commentators’) broader sense of the policing 

mission, Mark Moore develops a framework 

for holding police departments accountable. 

In Recognizing Value in Policing: The Challenge 

of Measuring Police Performance, he and his 

coauthors explore the range of data types and 

methods of observation that could provide a basis 

for assessing police performance in each of the 

following seven dimensions:20 

(1) Reducing criminal victimization. 

(2) Calling offenders to account. 

(3) Reducing fear and enhancing personal 

security. 

(4) Guaranteeing safety in public spaces 

(including traffic safety). 

(5) Using financial resources fairly, efficiently and 

effectively. 

(6) Using force and authority fairly, efficiently and 

effectively. 

(7) Satisfying customer demands/achieving 

legitimacy with those policed. 

Moore notes that reported crime statistics only 

partially capture levels of criminal victimization 

and that criminal victimization is only one of the 

seven dimensions of performance that matter to 

the public. In particular, he takes issue with the 

notion that crime statistics should be treated as 

the “bottom line” of policing. William J. Bratton 

had stated this view in an essay he contributed to 

NIJ’s Measuring What Matters: “Crime statistics 

have become the department’s bottom line, 

the best indicator of how the police are doing, 

precinct by precinct and citywide.”21 

Moore says the analogy with a commercial 

firm’s bottom line is flawed because the crime 

statistics themselves do not capture the costs of 

the methods used to achieve them. Reductions 

in crime levels ought, he says, to be treated as 

part of gross revenues (not net revenues), and 

the use by police of financial resources and 

especially the use of force or authority should be 

regarded as costs and therefore counted against 

the revenues.22 The “bottom line” is therefore 

served if police manage to bring down crime 

rates and are economical with their uses of force 

and money. 

[C]rime reduction is closer to the idea 

of the gross revenues a private company 

earns by producing and selling particular 

products and services, not its profit. [...] 
 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 13 

Managers ought to be interested in 

trying to widen the difference between 

the valuable results the police produce 

(reduced crime), and the costs incurred 

in producing those results.23 

In the early days of CompStat in New York City, 

with widespread use of aggressive street order 

maintenance tactics, it did not appear that huge 

numbers of arrests were regarded as a cost. In 

fact, the number of arrests seems to have been 

a source of pride for the department. George 

Kelling, in the essay he contributed to Measuring 

What Matters, commented: 

Even by more widely touted 

measurements, New York police do 

relatively well; so many people have been 

arrested that neither jails nor prisons 

can hold them. If the number of cells 

was expanded, few doubt that New York 

City police could fill almost any added 

capacity as well.24 

Carl Klockars, in his essay for Measuring What 

Matters, stressed the importance of the skill of 

minimizing the use of force.25 He points out how 

much officers vary in this regard and in their 

predisposition to resort to violent or nonviolent 

means to exercise control in their encounters 

with civilians: 

In any police agency there are officers 

who are well known for their ability to 

walk into an out-of-control situation and 

stabilize it peacefully. (There are others, 

of course, who can turn any situation 

into a riot.) The skill of such officers is 

[in] knowing how to work in ways that 

minimize the use of force.26 

Stuart Scheingold, in his essay for Measuring 

What Matters, warned that “... the kinds of police 

practices associated with zero-tolerance and 

hyper law enforcement seem likely to increase 

the mistrust of the police that robs crime control 

of its consensus building capacity.”27 Scheingold 

also recalls the warnings about the effects of 

zero tolerance and hyper law enforcement 

that Wesley Skogan provided in his 1990 book, 

Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of 

Decay in American Neighborhoods: 

Even if they are conducted in a strictly 

legal fashion, aggressive tactics such as 

saturating areas with police, stopping 

cars frequently, conducting extensive 

field interrogations and searches, and 

bursting into apartments suspected 

of harboring gambling or drugs can 

undermine police-community relations 

in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.28 

The underlying tensions between police and 

predominantly minority communities may 

amplify these costs, according to Skogan: 

[R]esidents of poor and minority 

neighborhoods with serious disorder 

problems often have antagonistic 

relations with the police. They regard 

the police as another of their problems, 

frequently perceiving them to be 

arrogant, brutal, racist, and corrupt.29 
 

 

14 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Moore, along with these and many other 

commentators, has urged police to recognize 

coercive power as a precious commodity to be 

used sparingly and invites them to search for 

artful interventions that use authority efficiently 

rather than defaulting to massive enforcement 

campaigns of one kind or another.30 The point 

is not to rule out enforcement campaigns where 

these are required. Rather, the point is that a 

full accounting of police performance demands 

serious attention to the costs as well as the gross 

revenues of such campaigns. 

Moore also proposes an expansive view of client 

satisfaction that includes an assessment of the 

experience of those arrested or cited. Not that 

we would expect them to be “pleased” that they 

were caught! But we would hope to hear that 

their rights were respected, that excessive force 

was not used against them, and that they were 

treated with dignity and courtesy even while 

being brought to book.31 

Broadening the Frame: Purposes of 

Measuring Performance 

Robert Behn’s 2003 article, “Why Measure 

Performance? Different Purposes Require 

Different Measures,”32 has recently been 

celebrated as one of the most influential articles 

in the history of the journal in which it was 

published, Public Administration Review. I 

often recommend this as foundational reading 

for practitioners wanting to rethink their 

department’s use of metrics and indicators. 

In this article, Behn lays out eight different 

managerial purposes that may be served by 

Table 1. Eight Purposes That Public Managers Have for 

Measuring Performance 

Purpose: The public manager’s question that the performance 

measure can help answer. 

Evaluate How well is my public agency performing? 

How can I ensure that my subordinates are doing the Control right thing? 

On what programs, people or projects should my Budget agency spend the public’s money? 

How can I motivate line staff, middle managers, 

nonprofit and for-profit collaborators, stakeholders, Motivate and citizens to do the things necessary to improve 

performance? 

How can I convince political superiors, legislators, 


Promote stakeholders, journalists and citizens that my agency 


is doing a good job?
 

What accomplishments are worthy of the important Celebrate organizational ritual of celebrating success? 

Learn Why is what working or not working? 

What exactly should who do differently to improve Improve performance? 

Source: Robert D. Behn, “Why Measure Performance? Different Purposes 

Require Different Measures,” Public Administration Review 63 (5) (Sept./ 

Oct. 2003): 586-606, table 1. 

various types of performance measurement and 

monitoring. He summarizes these in a table,33 

reproduced here as table 1. 

Behn also explores the different types of 

indicators that will serve these eight managerial 

purposes.34 

For example, evaluation of agency performance 

at the aggregate level (purpose 1) will involve 

attempts to link agency outputs with societal 

outcomes and will need to consider the effects of 

exogenous factors. 

Motivating teams internally (purpose 4) may 

use real-time, functionally specific activity and 

productivity metrics disaggregated to the team 

level. These might be compared with production 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 15 

targets or even pitted against one another in an 

internal competition. 

Organizational learning (purpose 7) may rest 

more on disaggregated data that can reveal 

anomalies and deviations from norms, revealing 

problems to be understood and resolved. 

Improvement of departmental processes 

(purpose 8) will require linking internal process 

design changes with their effects on agency 

outputs, efficiency and outcomes. 

Broadening the Frame: Recognizing Different 

Types of Work 

The fourth way to broaden the frame is to 

recognize the characteristics of different 

classes of work that coexist within a complex 

organization. 

First, and most familiar, is functional work, which 

groups workers with other similarly skilled 

workers. Investigators work together within a 

detective bureau, auditors in the audit bureau, 

educators in the training department, and 

lawyers in the general counsel’s office. Functional 

professionalism requires staying current, skilled 

and state-of-the-art. 

For any specialist functional unit, the most 

readily available metrics cover quantity and 

quality. Quantity is easiest to measure: how 

many cases opened and closed, how many 

audits completed, how many hours of training 

delivered. But each function should also have and 

emphasize its own quality metrics lest concerns 

over quantity drown out concerns over quality. 

Ideas about quality may include indications of 

significance or relevance (of a case or an audit) 

as well as assessments of whether the activities 

are conducted more or less professionally. A 

functional unit, if it divides its output quantity 

by its inputs, may also furnish indications of 

productivity or efficiency (e.g., the number of 

cases closed per investigator, the number of 

audits completed per auditor or the number of 

training hours delivered per instructor). 

Second, and also familiar, is process-based 

work. By this I mean any kind of transactional 

work that is repeated hundreds or thousands of 

times. Obvious examples include tax agencies 

processing tax returns, environmental agencies 

issuing or renewing environmental permits for 

industry, and a licensing authority processing 

applications, as well as police departments 

responding to emergency calls or to complaints 

from the public about officer conduct. Given 

the repetitive nature and volume of such work, 

organizations invest in process design (involving 

procedures, protocols, automation and flow 

patterns) to handle the loads in expeditious, 

smooth and predictable ways. 

Five categories of management information are 

associated with every process: 

(1)	 Volume: Measures of transaction volume (and 

trends in volume over time). This is important 

management information, as it affects 

resource allocation decisions even though 

the incoming volume may not be under the 

organization’s control. 
 

 

16 | New Perspectives in Policing 

(2)	 Timeliness: How long it takes to process 

transactions. Many processes have mandatory 

timelines. Measures used may include 

average processing times, worst-case times, 

or percentage of the transaction load that is 

handled within mandated or specified time 

periods. 

(3)	 Accuracy: The proportion of the 

determinations or judgments made that 

turn out to be “correct.” Metrics on accuracy 

usually come from case reviews or audits of 

samples conducted after the fact. Getting a 

decision right early is preferable to getting it 

right eventually (after review or on appeal), 

as it is quicker, cheaper and generally more 

satisfactory for all the stakeholders. 

(4)	 Cost-efficiency: Indicators of the cost of 

running the process divided by the transaction 

volume. (Processing costs per transaction can 

be driven down through process improvement, 

process redesign and automation.) 

(5)	 Client satisfaction: Almost every process 

transaction involves a client (a caller, a 

complainant, an applicant). Clients can be 

sampled and surveyed retrospectively to 

determine the nature of their experience with 

the process. Even if the client did not get the 

decision he or she wanted, he or she can still 

legitimately comment on whether the process 

seemed fair and efficient and whether he or 

she was treated properly. 

The third type of work, risk-based work, differs 

from functional work and process work. In the 

vocabulary of the police profession, the most 

familiar phrase for this would be problemoriented work. It is not about one particular 

method (functional), and it is not about quality 

management in the context of an established 

process; rather, it is about a specific risk 

concentration, issue or problem. For risk-based 

work, professionalism begins with spotting the 

problems early and discerning their character 

and dynamics, long before anyone decides 

which tactics might be relevant or whether any 

of the organization’s routine processes touch the 

problem at all. 

The following extract from The Character of Harms 

describes some of the frustrations that arise when 

agencies depend too heavily on functional and 

process-based metrics and fail to recognize 

problem-oriented or risk-based work as different: 

Even the combination of [the functional 

and process-based] performance stories 

falls short with respect to demonstrating 

effective harm-control. It might show 

the agency worked hard to apply the 

functional tools it has, and that it 

operated its established processes with 

alacrity and precision. But it leaves open 

the question of whether tool selection 

is effective, and whether the processes 

established touch the pressing issues of 

the day. The audience can see agencies 

working hard, which they like. But they 

would like to be convinced they are also 

working effectively on the problems 

they choose to address, and that they 

are identifying and selecting the most 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 17 

important issues to address. Neither the 

function-based performance story (e.g., 

“we completed this many high-quality 

investigations”) nor the process-based 

version (“we cleared our backlogs and 

streamlined our system”) provide such 

assurance.35 

The risk-based or problem-oriented performance 

story is quite different from the other two. It 

consists of a collection of project-based accounts, 

each comprising five elements:36 

(1) A description of the data or intelligence 

that alerted the department to the problem 

and showed it to be of sufficient scope and 

significance to warrant special attention. 

(2) A description of the metrics selected (which 

are project-specific) to be used in determining 

whether the condition “got better”; in other 

words, outcome or impact metrics through 

which project success or failure might be 

judged. 

(3) A description of the action plan adopted and 

maybe a second or third one used if and when 

it was determined that the first one failed. 

(4) A description of what happened to the project 

metrics over time and how the project team 

interpreted those changes. 

(5) A decision about project closure, hopefully 

with the problem sufficiently abated that 

resources could be withdrawn so the 

department could move on to the next 

pressing issue. Continuing attention to the 

problem would enter a longer term (and 

less resource-intensive) monitoring and 

maintenance phase. 

If a department succeeds in its crime-control 

mission, the heart of its success story will be 

the collection of project-based accounts, each 

describing an emerging crime pattern spotted 

early and dealt with skillfully. The more vigilant 

the department becomes in spotting emerging 

problems early, the less available significant 

crime reductions will be. Aggregate levels of 

crime may remain low but relatively steady, even 

as the department works hard to spot new threats 

before they have a chance to grow out of control. 

Criminologists and other evaluators of police 

performance — who tend to use changes in the 

aggregate reported crime rate as the outcome 

variable in their analysis — may not recognize 

best practice, as the crime reductions visible 

at the aggregate level may not be statistically 

significant or may not be present at all.37 

However, the risk-based performance account 

— which describes how the department kept the 

aggregate rates low — is always available. That 

account relies much less on aggregate crime 

numbers and instead describes the collection 

of problem-specific interventions. Relevant 

metrics are tailored to each project and derive 

from disaggregated data filtered to fit the problem 

being addressed. 
18 | New Perspectives in Policing 

On Setting Goals Using Performance 

Metrics 

With the distinctions between functional, 

process-based and risk-based work clarified, it 

might be worth observing which types of metrics 

associated with each type of work could or should 

be used for goal-setting — that is, as performance 

metrics. 

Some departments set targets for functional 

outputs, including enforcement activities such as 

arrests, stops, searches and traffic citations. This 

only makes sense in particular circumstances 

and should never be the default position or 

become normal practice. If you want quality 

work from a carpenter, it makes no sense to 

demand that he or she drill a certain number of 

holes or hammer a quota of nails. The essence of 

craftsmanship involves mastery of all the tools 

and the ability to select among them based on 

a clear understanding of the specific task in 

hand. Functional quotas make little sense in this 

context. 

The use of quotas for enforcement activity 

is always contentious, subject to officer 

whistleblowing and media scrutiny.38 The 

danger is that setting enforcement goals may 

bias the judgment of police officers in potentially 

dangerous ways and may contribute to aggressive 

or oppressive police conduct. Some jurisdictions 

have banned the use of quotas for traffic tickets.39 

Mandating a certain level of enforcement activity 

drives up the costs of policing for society and 

therefore reduces the “bottom line.” There may 

be smarter ways, more economical with respect 

to the use of force or authority, to procure the 

compliance or behavioral changes sought. 

Some departments deny setting quotas but 

admit to using enforcement productivity as 

a measure of patrol officers’ effort — in other 

words, as a performance metric. In terms of the 

effect on police operations, the two ideas are 

virtually indistinguishable. Measures of overall 

productivity spanning the full range of patrol 

tasks (including but not limited to enforcement) 

can reveal over time who is working hard and who 

is not. That, of course, is important management 

information. 

The danger of setting goals specifically for 

enforcement actions is that it may incline officers 

to stretch the limits of legality and fairness for 

the sake of another arrest or ticket. It is liable 

to produce quantity without regard to quality, 

relevance or side effects. It undermines the 

importance of discretion and judgment exercised 

at the frontline. 

Despite these general cautions, the use of some 

kind of enforcement campaign might still be 

appropriate in specific circumstances, but the 

need would arise only when a specific type of 

enforcement focus has been selected as the 

solution to address a specific crime problem. 

All of the following conditions would need to be 

satisfied: 

(1) A specific pattern of crime is being addressed. 

(2) The problem has been properly analyzed. 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 19 

(3) All the intervention options have been given 

full and open-minded consideration. 

(4) An action plan has been chosen that requires 

a period of intensive enforcement attention 

to specific violations (which we might call an 

enforcement campaign). 

(5) Instructions to frontline officers make it clear 

that, despite the context, every enforcement 

action must, given the circumstances of the 

case, be legally justifiable and appropriate. 

(6) During the implementation of the plan, 

management constantly and carefully 

monitors the legality, reasonableness, 

relevance, impact and side effects of the 

enforcement activities so that operations can 

wind down or change course as soon as is 

appropriate. 

In this context, the use of functional focus fits 

Behn’s managerial purposes of control (to make 

sure employees are carrying out the plan) and 

motivation (to increase intensity of effort). But 

the plan being carried out is one thoughtfully 

designed in response to a specific crime problem. 

The campaign is appropriate, therefore, because it 

constitutes an intervention for a specific problem. 

This differs from setting enforcement quotas 

just because “that’s what we do to show we’re 

serious” or because particular executives have an 

ideological preference for certain types of activity. 

A wise craftsman does not “believe in” any one 

tool any more than any other. Enforcement 

campaigns should be seldom used and their 

occasional use should be thoughtful, carefully 

monitored and temporary. 

If unrelenting pressure is applied to police 

officers to meet activity quotas of any kind 

(enforcement-related or not), they will surely find 

ways to produce quantity, even at the expense of 

quality, relevance, appropriateness or their own 

better judgment. If the goals set are unreasonable 

or not achievable through legitimate means, 

then illegitimate means may well be employed, 

producing behaviors not in the public interest. 

As Andrew P. Scipione, Commissioner of Police in 

New South Wales, Australia, wrote in 2012: 

There is a delicate balance. A 

preoccupation with numbers is 

unhealthy if it distracts from the 

primary need to apprehend the most 

serious criminals and care for the most 

traumatized victims; it is unhealthier 

still if it causes police on the streets 

to set aside sound judgment and the 

public good in the pursuit of arrest 

quotas, lest they attract management 

criticism or compromise their chances 

of promotion.40 

What about setting process-based goals? For core 

processes, it rarely makes sense to set goals for 

the incoming volume of transactions, as that 

is not usually under the organization’s control. 

It is appropriate to set goals for timeliness in 

processing, accuracy in determinations and client 

satisfaction. All three of these are candidates for 

close-to-real-time monitoring and target-setting. 

But managers should be careful to adjust the 

balance between them, as too great an emphasis 
20 | New Perspectives in Policing 

on timeliness can end up damaging accuracy and 

client satisfaction. 

Cost-efficiency is more often improved by 

periodically rethinking or redesigning the 

underlying processes (using technology and 

business process improvement methods) than 

by exerting constant pressure on operational staff. 

What about setting goals for risk-based work? 

Executives should demand vigilance from their 

crime analysis and intelligence staff so that their 

department spots emerging problems earlier 

rather than later. Executives should demand 

nimbleness and fluidity from those responsible 

for allocating resources within the system so that 

the right set of players can be formed into the 

right kind of team, at the right level, to tackle each 

unique pattern of crime or harm that appears. 

In addition, executives can emphasize their 

expectations for creativity and skill from those 

to whom problem-solving projects are entrusted. 

Those involved in risk-based (problem-oriented) 

work should retain a strong methodological 

focus on achieving relevant outcomes rather 

than churning out enormous volumes of familiar 

outputs. It is tempting, once a plausible plan has 

been selected that involves activities, to allow the 

monitoring systems to focus on the production of 

those activities rather than achievement of the 

desired outcomes. What starts as thoughtful riskbased work can morph over time into functional 

quotas — not least because functional quotas are 

much easier to monitor. 

A Closer Look at Crime Reduction as the 

Bottom Line of Policing 

Holding these broader frameworks in mind, let 

us return for a moment to the dangers of relying 

too heavily on reported crime rates as the bottom 

line for policing. More needs to be said about the 

ways in which a relentless focus on reductions 

in reported crime rates (a) produces too narrow 

a focus and (b) invites manipulation of statistics 

and other forms of corruption. 

The Dangers of Narrowness 

The focus is narrow because crime control is 

just one of several components of the police 

mission. The focus on serious crimes is narrower 

still, as community concerns often revolve 

around other problems. The focus on aggregate 

numbers is misleading, as some crimes have a 

disproportionate impact on community life or 

levels of fear. 

Focusing on reported crime overlooks unreported 

crimes, which are generally more numerous than 

reported crimes. Particular types of crime — 

sexual assaults, domestic violence and other 

crimes within the family, white-collar crimes, 

crimes involving intimidation or where victims 

have a reason not to want to go to the authorities — 

are all notoriously underreported. Klockars41 

points out that even homicide rates may be 

unreliable to a degree. Apparent suicides, deaths 

reported as accidental, and unresolved cases of 

missing persons may all act as masks for some 

murders. “Particularly vulnerable to having their 

murders misclassified this way are transients, 
Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 21 

street people, illegal aliens, and others who, if 

missed at all, are not missed for long.”42 

Consensual crimes (such as bribery or drug 

dealing), with no immediate victim to complain, 

go essentially unreported and therefore appear 

in police statistics only if they are uncovered 

through police operations. 

Most commentators recognize the difficulty and 

expense of carrying out victimization surveys 

in order to get better estimates. But most find 

no available alternative and recommend police 

departments consider the option seriously. As 

Moore and colleagues put it: 

Determining the level of unreported 

crime is important not only to get a 

more accurate measure of the real rate 

of criminal victimization, but also to 

determine how much confidence citizens 

have in asking the police for help. 

The only way to measure the underlying 

rate of victimization is to conduct a 

general survey of citizens asking about 

their victimization, and their reasons for 

failing to report crime to the police. 

... [I]f one wants to get close to the real 

level of victimization, and to learn 

about the extent to which the police 

have earned citizens’ confidence in 

responding to criminal offenses, then 

there is little choice but to complement 

information on reported crime with 

information gained from general surveys 

of local populations.43 

Moore and his coauthors also note the efficiencies 

available once a system for conducting 

victimization surveys has been set up: 

[W]e can use that system to answer 

many other important questions about 

policing. Specifically, we can learn a great 

deal about citizens’ fears and their selfdefense efforts, as well as their criminal 

victimization. We can learn about their 

general attitudes toward the police and 

how those attitudes are formed.44 

Moore and Braga45 also point out the value of using 

other data sources as a way of cross-checking or 

validating trends suggested by police statistics. 

Particularly useful would be public health data 

from hospital emergency rooms that might reveal 

“the physical attacks that happen behind closed 

doors, or which are otherwise not reported to the 

police.”46 Langton and colleagues estimate that, 

nationwide, 31 percent of victimizations from 

2006 to 2010 involving a weapon and injury to 

the victim went unreported to police.47 Even when 

assaults involved the use of a firearm, roughly 4 in 

10 cases went unreported to police.48 Many such 

cases are visible to public health systems. 

As noted earlier, pressure to reduce the numbers 

is counterproductive when dealing with the 

whole class of invisible crimes (classically 

unreported or underreported crimes). Successful 

campaigns against these types of crime often 
 

22 | New Perspectives in Policing 

involve deliberate attempts to expose the problem 

by first driving reporting rates up, not down.49 

Corruption in Reporting Crime Statistics 

Relentless pressure to reduce the number of 

crimes reported, without equivalent pressure 

to preserve the integrity of the recording 

and reporting systems, invites manipulation 

of statistics. The most obvious forms of 

manipulation involve suppression of reports 

(failing to take reports of crime from victims) and 

misclassification of crimes to lower categories in 

order to make the serious crime statistics look 

better. 

This ought not to surprise anyone. It is an obvious 

danger naturally produced by too narrow a focus 

on one numerical metric. John A. Eterno and 

Eli B. Silverman, in their 2012 book, The Crime 

Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation,

50 

have compiled an extensive history of corruption 

scandals involving manipulation of crime 

statistics that spans decades and many countries. 

England and Wales, France, and the Australian 

states of New South Wales and Victoria have all 

experienced major scandals.51 In the 1980s, the 

Chicago Police Department suffered a major 

scandal, accused of “killing crime” on a massive 

scale by refusing to write up official reports of 

offenses reported to them.52 Detectives were 

caught “unfounding” (determining a case was 

unverifiable) complaints of rape, robbery and 

assault without investigation.53 Other major 

U.S. cities have had similar scandals, including 

Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York City, 

Atlanta, Boca Raton, Fla., and Chicago.54 

Cheating on crime statistics, as a formidable 

temptation for police departments, goes with 

the territory. It remains a current problem, with 

a continuing stream of allegations and inquiries 

in various jurisdictions. In the United Kingdom, 

Chief Inspector of Constabulary Tom Winsor 

testified to a Commons Committee in December 

2013 that British police forces were undoubtedly 

manipulating crime statistics, and the question 

was only “where, how much, how severe?”55 

According to the Guardian newspaper, he later 

hinted that he thought the cheating might be on 

an “industrial” scale.56 

Two investigative reports published by Chicago 

Magazine in April and May 2014 raised new 

questions about manipulation of crime statistics 

by the Chicago Police Department, including the 

downgrading of homicide cases.57 In Scotland, 

the U.K. Statistics Authority rejected the 

government’s claims to have achieved record 

low crime rates in August 2014 amid claims from 

retired police officers that crime figures had been 

manipulated “to present a more rosy picture of 

law and order to the public.”58 

Eterno and Silverman also show, through their 

survey of relevant public management literature, 

that such dangers are well understood in other 

fields and by now ought to be broadly recognized 

throughout the public sector.59 

In 1976, social psychologist Donald Campbell 

wrote: 
 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 23 

The more any quantitative social 

indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to 

corruption pressures and the more apt 

it will be to distort or corrupt the social 

processes it is intended to monitor.60 

Addressing the phenomenon of crime statistics 

in particular, Campbell notes: 

Crime rates are in general very 

corruptible indicators. For many crimes, 

changes in rates are a reflection of 

changes in the activity of the police rather 

than changes in the number of criminal 

acts [references deleted]. It seems to be 

well documented that a well-publicized, 

deliberate effort at social change — 

Nixon’s crackdown on crime — had as 

its main effect the corruption of crimerate indicators ... achieved through 

under-recording and by downgrading 

the crimes to less serious classifications.61 

Diane Vaughan, who has studied many forms 

of organizational misconduct, says that trouble 

arises when the social context puts greater 

emphasis on achieving the ends than on 

restricting the means: 

When the achievement of the desired 

goals received strong cultural emphasis, 

while much less emphasis is placed on 

the norms regulating the means, these 

norms tend to lose their power to regulate 

behavior.62 

What I have elsewhere termed “performanceenhancing risk-taking” turns out to be one 

of the most common sources of public-sector 

corruption. Officials take actions that are illegal, 

unethical or excessively risky, and they do so 

not because they are inherently bad people or 

motivated by personal gain but because they 

want to help their agency do better or look better 

and they are often placed under intense pressure 

from a narrow set of quantitative performance 

metrics.63 As a consequence of the pressures, an 

internal culture emerges that celebrates those 

who “know what’s required and are prepared to 

step up” — whether that means torturing terror 

suspects to extract information, “testilying” to 

procure convictions, or cooking the books to 

achieve the crime reductions that executives 

demand. 

Few in the police profession will need to be told 

how one might “cook the books.” Robert Zink, 

the Recording Secretary of NYPD’s Patrolmen’s 

Benevolent Association, put it plainly in 2004: 

[S]o how do you fake a crime decrease? 

It’s pretty simple. Don’t file reports, 

misclassify crimes from felonies to 

misdemeanors, under-value the property 

lost to crime so it’s not a felony, and report 

a series of crimes as a single event. A 

particularly insidious way to fudge 

the numbers is to make it difficult or 

impossible for people to report crimes — 

in other words, make the victims feel like 

criminals so they walk away just to spare 

themselves further pain and suffering.64 
 

24 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Integrity Issues Related to CompStat 

and Crime Reporting at the NYPD 

There is good reason to pay special attention to 

the NYPD’s early experience with CompStat. 

A great many other departments have copied 

it and now run similar systems or variants 

of it. The use of CompStat-style systems has 

therefore substantially affected how many police 

departments view performance measurement, 

both in the ways they describe their performance 

at the agency level and in the ways they hold 

subunits accountable. So the effects of such 

systems — both positive and negative — need to 

be broadly understood. 

The original form of CompStat as implemented 

by the NYPD in 1994 had a set of very particular 

features. 

The system focused almost exclusively on 

reported rates for Part I Index crimes.65 The 

principal data source was “reported crime,” and 

the performance focus was unambiguously and 

always to “drive the numbers down.” Crime 

analysis was principally based on place and 

time so that hot spots could be identified and 

dealt with. Accountability for performance was 

organized geographically and by precinct and 

was therefore intensely focused on precinct 

commanders. The precinct commanders were 

required to stand and deliver their results, or 

explain the lack of them, at the “podium” in 

the CompStat meetings — a famously stressful 

experience. 

The managerial style employed seemed 

combative and adversarial. Garry McCarthy, 

who experienced the system in New York and 

replicated it in Chicago, recalled the New 

York experience of CompStat meetings in an 

interview with Chicago Magazine: “When I was 

a commander in New York, it was full contact,” 

he said in 2012. “And if you weren’t careful, you 

could lose an eye.”66 

The early days of CompStat also focused on a 

particular class of offenders and offenses and 

promoted a somewhat standardized response. As 

Bratton wrote in 1999, “Intensive quality-of-life 

enforcement has become the order of the day in 

the NYPD.”67 The targets were disorganized street 

criminals, as Bratton noted: “In fact, the criminal 

element responsible for most street crime is 

nothing but a bunch of disorganized individuals, 

many of whom are not very good at what they do. 

The police have all the advantages in training, 

equipment, organization, and strategy.”68 The 

primary intervention strategy solution was 

aggressive street-order maintenance: “We can 

turn the tables on the criminal element. Instead 

of reacting to them, we can create a sense of 

police presence and police effectiveness that 

makes criminals react to us.”69 

The CompStat system was also used to drive 

enforcement quotas throughout the city for 

arrests, citations and stops/searches as well 

as to press senior management’s demands for 

reductions in reported crime rates. 

There is no doubt that the system was effective 

in driving performance of the type chosen. 

As Bratton wrote: “Goals, it turns out, are 

an extremely important part of lifting a 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 25 

low-performing organization to higher levels 

of accomplishment and revitalizing an 

organizational culture.”70 

In 2002, Moore described the early 

implementation of CompStat in the NYPD thus: 

It was close to a strict liability system 

focused on outcomes. As a result, it is 

not surprising that the system ran a 

strong current through the department. 

Given that the system was consciously 

constructed to be behaviorally powerful, 

it becomes particularly important to 

know what it was motivating managers 

to do.71 

Eterno and Silverman surveyed retired NYPD 

managers at or above the rank of captain to try 

to understand the effects of the CompStat system 

on the nature and extent of crime statistics 

manipulation. One of their survey findings was 

that respondents reported a diminished sense 

of pressure for integrity in reporting, even as 

CompStat imposed enormous pressure for crime 

reductions.72 

Public concerns about what CompStat was 

motivating managers to do were heightened when 

the Village Voice published transcripts of Officer 

Adrian Schoolcraft’s secretly recorded audiotapes 

of roll calls and other police meetings. Journalist 

Graham Rayman authored five articles, published 

in The Village Voice from May 4 to August 25, 2010, 

exploring the manipulation of crime statistics 

and the use of arrest and stop-and-frisk quotas 

in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 81st Precinct, 

as well as a 2012 follow-up article confirming 

the results of the investigation into Schoolcraft’s 

allegations.73 

In addition, 2010 saw the first wave of internal 

investigations within the NYPD for crime 

statistics manipulation. A department spokesman 

told the New York Times in February 2010 that 

Commissioner Raymond Kelly had disciplined 

four precinct commanders and seven other senior 

managers for downgrading crime reports.74 In 

October 2010, the department disciplined the 

former commander of the 81st Precinct and four 

others for downgrading or refusing to take crime 

reports.75 

In January 2011, Commissioner Kelly appointed 

a panel of three former federal prosecutors to 

examine NYPD’s crime statistics recording and 

reporting practices, giving them 3 to 6 months 

to report.76 Sadly, one of the three died while 

the panel was conducting its investigation, but 

the remaining two published the final report on 

April 8, 2013.77 

The Crime Reporting Review (CRR) Committee 

acknowledged the danger of senior managers 

exerting pressure on subordinates to manipulate 

crime statistics and noted that there had been 

substantiated reports of manipulation in the 

past.78 They reported that the NYPD’s own 

investigation of the 81st Precinct had “largely 

substantiated” Officer Schoolcraft’s allegations 

regarding precinct supervisors exerting 

significant pressure on patrol officers not only to 

meet quotas on activities such as issuing traffic 
 

 

26 | New Perspectives in Policing 

tickets but also to manipulate or not take crime 

reports.79 

The CRR Committee had not been asked to 

determine the extent to which the NYPD had 

manipulated or was manipulating crime 

statistics. Rather, their task was to examine 

the control systems in place to see if they were 

robust enough to guarantee integrity in the face 

of the obvious and substantial pressures of the 

CompStat environment. 

First, the committee examined the process-level 

controls and protocols governing the taking and 

classifying of crime reports. They determined 

that these were insufficient to counteract the 

danger of intentional manipulation.80 

They then examined the audit systems that the 

NYPD used to review crime reports and crime 

classification decisions after the fact. They found, 

not surprisingly, that “the risk of suppression (as 

measured by its effect on reported crime) may be 

more substantial than the risk of downgrading.”81 

With downgrading, there is at least a trail 

of records that can be reviewed, from the 

initial “scratch report” to the final system 

entry, and a set of policy criteria are available 

to test the determinations made. The system 

of audits conducted by the Quality Assurance 

Division (QAD) that the department used to 

test crime classifications uncovered patterns 

of downgrading with respect to robberies, 

burglaries and larcenies. QAD audits identified 

patterns of larcenies downgraded to lost property 

when complainants did not see their property 

being stolen, robberies being downgraded to 

larcenies, burglaries being downgraded to 

larcenies by omitting a complaint of an unlawful 

entry, and attempted burglaries evidenced by 

broken locks or attempted breakdown of a door 

being classified as criminal mischief.82 

With crime suppression — failing to take a 

complaint, discouraging or intimidating a 

complainant, or otherwise making it awkward 

or unpleasant to report crime — there is often no 

written record to review, except in the case of 911 

“radio runs” when the central call system retains 

a note of the original call. 

The most plausible way to detect patterns of 

suppression is to audit the radio runs and revisit 

the callers, comparing what happened within the 

department with what should have happened 

as a result of the call. The NYPD implemented 

such audits (called SPRINT audits) in 2010. The 

CRR Committee noted that before 2010 no 

mechanisms were in place to determine the 

level of crime suppression, and hence there was 

no way of estimating the effect that any patterns 

of crime suppression may have had on NYPD’s 

recorded crime rates.83 The committee also noted 

that implementation of the SPRINT audits had 

resulted in a relatively high rate of disciplinary 

actions, with investigations of 71 commands 

in 2011 and 57 commands in 2012, and 

administrative sanctions being sought against 

173 officers as a result of those investigations.84 

The committee recommended a substantial 

increase in the breadth, depth and volume of 

SPRINT audits in the future as, at the time of the 

committee’s report (2013), these had been applied 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 27 

only to limited categories of calls (robbery and 

burglary).85 

Wesley Skogan points out that this type of audit, 

even if used extensively, can still only provide 

a partial view of crime suppression practices.86 

Sampling the transactions that pass through 

a centralized 911 system misses all the other 

attempts by citizens to report crimes through 

the panoply of alternate channels now available 

— beepers, cell phones, voice mail and face-toface reporting.87 

Almost nobody denies that the relentless pressure 

to reduce reported (or, to be more precise, 

recorded) crime rates produced patterns of 

misclassification and crime report suppression. 

The question of the extent to which manipulation 

of crime statistics became institutionalized at 

NYPD, or whether the cases of manipulation 

that have come to light were isolated, remains 

unresolved. This paper cannot and does not 

attempt to resolve that question. Nobody doubts 

that crime has fallen dramatically in New York 

City in the last 20 years and that the city is 

now much safer than it was before. The CRR 

Committee was keen to make that clear, noting 

in its conclusion that declines in overall crime 

rates in NYC over the previous 10 or 20 years were 

indeed “historic.”88 

The purpose here is not to undermine the 

achievements of the NYPD. CompStat was a 

major innovation when it was introduced and no 

doubt contributed substantially to the crime rate 

reductions achieved, even though criminologists 

still disagree about how much.89 

There is evidence that the NYPD has recognized 

some of the dangers of its original CompStat 

model. The NYPD has disciplined a substantial 

number of officers over issues of crime 

suppression and misclassification and increased 

the number and types of audits designed to help 

guarantee integrity in reporting. Precinct-level 

officers interviewed by the CRR Committee 

during the review period, 2011-2013, indicated 

that “the culture surrounding complaintreporting had changed [improved] from ‘what it 

had been.’”90 The NYPD has also backed off its use 

of enforcement quotas to some degree. These are 

signs that the NYPD is rebalancing the pressures 

acting on its officers and paying more attention 

to the means as well as to the ends of reducing 

reported crime rates. 

Looking forward, and with a focus on best 

practice, I stress that intense pressure for a 

reduction in crime numbers is liable — for many 

reasons well understood throughout private 

industry and in public management — to produce 

corruption, manipulation of statistics, and other 

patterns of behavior not in the public interest, 

unless an equivalent and counterbalancing level 

of attention is paid to the integrity of recording 

and reporting systems, the governance of means 

and careful monitoring of side effects. 

Departments that do great work, but leave 

themselves open to integrity risks, may face 

public cynicism about their self-reported results 

and have an ugly cloud over their successes. 
28 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Implications for CompStat-Like Systems 

There has been much debate as to whether the 

early focus of CompStat and the methods that 

the system drove were ever right, even for New 

York City. The 1999 collection of essays, Measuring 

What Matters,91 reflects much of that debate. But 

this narrow form is certainly not appropriate now 

and certainly is not appropriate in general or in 

other jurisdictions. 

In the past 20 years, the police profession has 

had the opportunity to learn a great deal about 

the strengths and weaknesses of the original 

CompStat model and to figure out what types of 

modifications to the original model can improve 

it or better adapt it for use in other jurisdictions. 

Many variations can now be found. Some of them 

still reflect particular and narrow aspects of the 

original form. Other versions are much broader, 

more mature, and seem both more versatile 

and, in some ways, more humane. Which 

version a department uses is likely to have a 

significant effect on its approach to performance 

measurement and reporting. 

Table 2 shows six dimensions in which CompStatlike systems for crime analysis and accountability 

might be either narrower or broader. These six 

dimensions provide an opportunity for police 

executives to examine their own system and 

determine where, along each spectrum, their 

current CompStat implementation lies. Any 

dimension in which a system sits close to the 

narrow end represents an opportunity for 

improvement and might enable a department to 

replace its current model with a more versatile 

and less restrictive version. 

Table 2. CompStat Implementation Options 

Broader Narrow forms (mature) forms 

Multiple sources, 

Data sources Reported crime rates including 

victimization 

surveys 

Forms of analysis 

Geographic (by 

precinct and 

cluster) and 

temporal 

Versatile, considering 

full range of relevant 

dimensions 

Emphasize increased 

Performance focus Drive the numbers 

down 

reporting to expose 

and deal with hidden 

problems 

Locus of 

responsibility Precinct commanders Tailored to each 

problem 

Managerial style Adversarial Cooperative/coaching 

Preferred tactics Directed patrol, street 

order maintenance 

Full range of 

interventions 

Many of the issues discussed so far in this paper 

would naturally push toward the broader end of 

each spectrum. Recognizing Goldstein’s more 

inclusive view of the police mission, Moore’s 

multiple dimensions of performance, and the 

need for organizational nimbleness and skill 

in addressing many different types of problems 

that police face should all help to shake police 

departments out of too narrow a focus. 

Data sources: As this paper has already made 

clear, Part I index crimes remain important, 

but community concerns frequently center on 

other issues. Many crimes are not reported, and 

therefore police would need to use a broader 

range of data sources — including public health 

information and victimization surveys — even 

to be able to see the full range of problems that 

matter. 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 29 

Forms of analysis: Crime analysis should no longer 

revolve solely or mainly around hot spot analysis. 

Goldstein repeatedly pressed police to recognize 

that crime problems were often not concentrated 

geographically but were concentrated in other 

dimensions (e.g., repeat offenders who roamed 

the city, repeat victims, methods of commission, 

patterns of behavior and types of victims).92 

Therefore, adding forms of analysis that focus 

on dimensions other than time and place is 

important for broadening the range of problems 

that crime analysis can reveal. 

Performance focus: The performance focus should 

be carefully chosen, depending on the character 

of the problem being addressed. “Driving 

numbers down” is an appropriate focus only for 

crimes where discovery rates are high and the 

frequency of the crime is currently far greater 

than normal levels (i.e., there is slack to be taken 

up). It is not appropriate for the many types of 

invisible problems that need to be better exposed 

before they can be dealt with. And “reducing the 

numbers” will not be possible in perpetuity as 

crime rates will inevitably level off once they have 

reached reasonable levels. For jurisdictions that 

are relatively safe to begin with, reductions may 

not be possible, even in the short term. 

Locus of responsibility: It makes sense to 

make precinct commanders unambiguously 

responsible for problems that are tightly 

concentrated within one precinct. But many 

issues are citywide or fit awkwardly into the 

precinct organization. A mature problemoriented organization will use more fluid systems 

that allow for the formation of problem-solving 

teams at many different levels of an organization 

to match the breadth and distribution of various 

problems. 

Managerial style: In terms of managerial style, 

pressure to perform is one thing. But a modern 

police department has no place for tyrannical 

management, deliberate humiliation of officers 

in front of their peers, or attempts to catch 

them out with analytic findings not previously 

shared. Mature forms of CompStat should 

embody congenial and cooperative managerial 

relationships, even as they remain ruthlessly 

analytical and outcome oriented. Adversarial 

managerial styles exercised at high levels within 

a department tend to trickle all the way down, 

resulting in intolerable pressure on frontline 

officers and, ultimately, inappropriate forms of 

police action on the streets. 

Preferred tactics: Aggressive zero-tolerance style 

policing is relevant only to specific classes of 

street crime and, as many commentators have 

observed, can destroy community relationships 

and cooperation. Persistent use of aggressive 

policing tactics, particularly in disadvantaged 

and minority neighborhoods, may be a recipe 

for anti-police riots in the end, given some 

appropriate spark. A mature CompStat system 

should bring no underlying preference for any 

particular set of tactics. Teams working on 

problems should be required and expected to 

consider the full range of interventions available 

to them and to invent new methods where 

necessary. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

30 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Table 2 offers a simple tool for diagnosing 

whether and in which particular ways an 

existing CompStat implementation might still be 

narrow or immature, highlighting opportunities 

to develop more sophisticated ideas about 

performance and more nuanced organizational 

responses to a broader range of issues across the 

six dimensions presented. 

Conclusion 

The principal purpose of this paper has been to 

highlight some of the narrower traditions into 

which police organizations fall when describing 

their value and reporting their performance. A 

modern police organization needs a broader view 

of its mission (per Goldstein),93 a broader view of 

the dimensions of performance (per Moore),94 

and a clear understanding of the metrics that 

Recommended Further Readings 

•	 In Measuring What Matters, pages 43 to 47, Wesley Skogan provides a practical discussion of methods for 

assessing levels of disorder in neighborhoods.95 

•	 In Measuring What Matters, pages 47 to 50, Skogan also offers advice on measuring the fear of crime and its 

impact on community behavior and the use of public spaces.96 

•	 In Measuring What Matters, pages 58 to 59, Darrel Stephens offers ideas about measuring disorder and describes 

work by volunteer groups in St. Petersburg to survey residents and record physical conditions in neighborhoods.97 

•	 In Measuring What Matters, pages 202 to 204, Carl Klockars provides examples of simple-to-administer crime 

victim surveys, asking for feedback on the nature and quality of services delivered to them by police departments.98 

•	 In Measuring What Matters, pages 208 to 212, Klockars also stresses the importance of assessing levels of 

integrity within a police department (as a matter of organizational culture, rather than trying to measure actual 

levels of corruption) and describes some practical ways of doing what many might claim cannot be done.99 

•	 In The “Bottom Line” of Policing, pages 30 to 75,100 in a section entitled “Measuring Performance on the Seven 

Dimensions,” Mark Moore and Anthony Braga provide a rich collection of practical ways to gather data, use existing 

data, and generate indicators relevant to each of the seven dimensions of performance. These are summarized in 

note form in table 3, pages 80 to 82,101 with suggestions for immediate investments prioritized in table 4, pages 

83 to 85.102 

•	 Chapter 8 of The Character of Harms explores the special challenges that go with the class of invisible risks (those 

with low discovery rates). Much of that discussion revolves around issues of measurement, in particular the 

methods required to resolve the inherent ambiguity of readily available metrics.103 

•	 The 2012 Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, Victimizations Not Reported to the Police, 2006-2010, by 

Lynn Langton and colleagues, provides an interesting and data-rich analysis of the frequency with which various 

forms of victimization are not reported to the police.104 

•	 Chapter 12 of The Character of Harms provides a more rigorous analysis of performance-enhancing risks, 

describing the special threats to integrity that commonly arise when too much emphasis is placed on too narrow 

a set of quantitative metrics.105 
 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 31 

go with different types of work. Overall, police 

departments need more complex cockpits. 

Police executives need a more sophisticated 

understanding of how to use different types of 

information to understand the condition of their 

organizations and what is happening in the 

communities they serve. 

Another purpose was to point police executives 

toward existing resources on this subject that 

they might find useful. For those interested 

in developing a more comprehensive suite of 

instruments for their “cockpit” and a clearer 

sense of how to use them all, I would particularly 

recommend the selections referenced in the 

“Recommended Further Readings” as relevant, 

practical and accessible. 

In discussing this subject with police executives 

in the classroom, two questions invariably come 

up. First, someone will object, “So what’s new? 

Haven’t you just invented the balanced scorecard 

for public agencies?” 

Not exactly. The cockpit I imagine is not really 

a “balanced scorecard”; it is hardly a “scorecard” 

at all. It is a richer information environment 

with much more sophisticated users. Police 

executives need a more comprehensive suite of 

managerial information but — like the airline 

pilot — should be slow to label any specific dial a 

performance indicator. As soon as you designate 

an indicator as a performance indicator, you need 

to think carefully about the currents that will run 

through the organization and make sure that you 

anticipate and can control perverse behaviors 

that may arise. 

The second question that students raise is 

this: “So, to get the public and the politicians 

to pay attention to this broader, more complex 

performance story, should we withhold the 

traditional statistics (reported Part I crime 

figures) so we are not held hostage by them?” 

My normal advice is basically this: “No, it’s a 

democracy, and transparency is the default 

setting. You cannot and would not want to 

hide that information. It remains important 

managerial information. Your job is not to 

withhold the traditional performance account 

but to dethrone it. You have to provide a richer 

story that better reflects the breadth of your 

mission and the contributions your agency 

makes. You have to provide that story even if the 

press, the politicians and the public do not seem 

to be asking for it just yet. Educate them about 

what matters, by giving it to them whether they 

ask for it or not. In the end, you can reshape their 

expectations.” 

Endnotes 

1. Measuring What Matters: Proceedings From 

the Policing Research Institute Meetings, edited 

by Robert H. Langworthy. Research Report. 

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

National Institute of Justice, July 1999. NCJ 170610, 

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/170610.pdf. 

2. Moore, Mark H., with David Thacher, Andrea 

Dodge and Tobias Moore, Recognizing Value 

in Policing: The Challenge of Measuring Police 

Performance. Washington, D.C.: Police Executive 

Research Forum, 2002. 
 

 

32 | New Perspectives in Policing 

3. Moore, Mark H., and Anthony Braga, The 

“Bottom Line” of Policing: What Citizens Should 

Value (and Measure!) in Police Performance. 

Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research 

Forum, 2003. http://w w w.policeforum.org/ 

assets/docs/Free_Online_Documents/Police_ 

Evaluation/the%20bottom%20line%20of%20 

policing%202003.pdf. 

4. Skogan, Wesley G., “Measuring What Matters: 

Crime, Disorder, and Fear,” in Measuring 

What Matters: Proceedings From the Policing 

Research Institute Meetings, edited by Robert H. 

Langworthy. Research Report. Washington, D.C.: 

U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of 

Justice, July 1999. NCJ 170610, https://www.ncjrs. 

gov/pdffiles1/nij/170610.pdf, pp. 36-53, at 38. 

5. For a detailed study of the frequency with 

which various forms of victimization are not 

reported to the police, see Langton, Lynn, Marcus 

Berzofsky, Christopher Krebs and Hope SmileyMcDonald, Victimizations Not Reported to the 

Police, 2006-2010. Special Report. Washington, 

D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice 

Statistics, August 2012. NCJ 238536, http://www. 

bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf. 

6. For a detailed discussion of invisible harms 

and the special challenges involved in controlling 

them, see Chapter 8, “Invisible Harms,” in 

Sparrow, Malcolm K., The Character of Harms: 

Operational Challenges in Control. Cambridge, 

England: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 

7. Sparrow, The Character of Harms, pp. 143-144. 

8. Adapted from Sparrow, Malcolm K., 

“Foreword,” in Financial Supervision in the 21st 

Century, edited by A. Joanne Kellerman, Jakob 

de Haan, and Femke de Vries. New York, New 

York: Springer-Verlag, 2013. This framework was 

first described in Sparrow, Malcolm K., “The 

Sabotage of Harms: An Emerging Art Form for 

Public Managers,” ESADE Institute of Public 

Governance & Management, E-newsletter, March 

2012 (published in English, Spanish and Catalan). 

9. The report, which is not public, was provided to 

the author by Assistant Commissioner Wilhelmy. 

10. The advent of the six-axis or “full-flight” 

simulators for pilot training in the 1990s is 

regarded as one of the most significant recent 

contributors to enhanced safety in commercial 

aviation. 

11. Klockars, Carl B., “Some Really Cheap Ways of 

Measuring What Really Matters,” in Measuring 

What Matters: Proceedings From the Policing 

Research Institute Meetings, edited by Robert H. 

Langworthy. Research Report. Washington, D.C.: 

U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of 

Justice, July 1999. NCJ 170610, https://www.ncjrs. 

gov/pdffiles1/nij/170610.pdf, pp. 195-214, at 197. 

12. See, e.g., Goldstein, Herman, Policing a Free 

Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 

1977. 

13. See, e.g., Moore and Braga, The “Bottom Line” 

of Policing; Moore et al., Recognizing Value in 

Policing. 
Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 33 

14. See, e.g., Behn, Robert D., “Why Measure 

Performance? Different Purposes Require 

Different Measures,” Public Administration 

Review 63 (5) (Sept./Oct. 2003): 586-606. 

15. See, e.g., Sparrow, The Character of Harms. 

16. Goldstein, Policing a Free Society, p. 35. 

17. Behn, Robert D., “On the Core Drivers of: 

CitiStat.” Bob Behn’s Public Management Report 

2 (3) (November 2004). 

18. Moore, Mark H., and Margaret Poethig, “The 

Police as an Agency of Municipal Government: 

Implications for Measuring Police Effectiveness,” 

in Measuring What Matters: Proceedings From 

the Policing Research Institute Meetings, edited 

by Robert H. Langworthy. Research Report. 

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

National Institute of Justice, July 1999. NCJ 170610, 

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/170610.pdf, 

pp. 151-167, at 153. 

19. Ibid., p. 157. 

20. Moore et al., Recognizing Value in Policing, 

p. 76, table 2. 

21. Bratton, William J., “Great Expectations: How 

Higher Expectations for Police Departments 

Can Lead to a Decrease in Crime,” in Measuring 

What Matters: Proceedings From the Policing 

Research Institute Meetings, edited by Robert H. 

Langworthy. Research Report. Washington, D.C.: 

U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of 

Justice, July 1999. NCJ 170610, https://www.ncjrs. 

gov/pdffiles1/nij/170610.pdf, pp. 11-26, at 15. 

22. Moore et al., Recognizing Value in Policing, pp. 

24-25. 

23. Ibid., p. 25. 

24. Kelling, George, “Measuring What Matters: 

A New Way of Thinking About Crime and Public 

Order,” in Measuring What Matters: Proceedings 

From the Policing Research Institute Meetings, 

edited by Robert H. Langworthy. Research Report. 

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

National Institute of Justice, July 1999. NCJ 170610, 

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/170610.pdf, 

pp. 27-35, at 27. 

25. Klockars, “Some Really Cheap Ways of 

Measuring What Really Matters,” pp. 205-208. 

26. Ibid., p. 206. 

27. Scheingold, Stuart A. “Constituent 

Expectations of the Police and Police 

Expectations of Constituents,” in Measuring 

What Matters: Proceedings From the Policing 

Research Institute Meetings, edited by Robert H. 

Langworthy. Research Report. Washington, D.C.: 

U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of 

Justice, July 1999. NCJ 170610, https://www.ncjrs. 

gov/pdffiles1/nij/170610.pdf, pp. 183-192, at 186. 

28. Skogan, Wesley G., Disorder and Decline: 

Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American 

Neighborhoods. New York, New York: The Free 

Press, 1990, p. 166. 

29. Ibid., p. 172. 
 

34 | New Perspectives in Policing 

30. Moore et al., Recognizing Value in Policing. 

31. Ibid., p. 79. 

32. Behn, “Why Measure Performance?” 

33. Ibid., p. 588, table 1. 

34. For a summary of this analysis, see ibid., p. 

593, table 2. 

35. Sparrow, The Character of Harms, pp. 123-124. 

See Chapter 6, “Puzzles of Measurement,” for a 

discussion of the unique characteristics of a riskcontrol performance account. 

36. The formal structure and essential rigors of 

the problem-oriented approach are described 

in detail in ibid., chapter 7. The associated 

performance measurement challenges are 

explored in chapters 5 and 6. 

37. For a detailed discussion of the potential 

tensions between problem-oriented policing 

and “evidence-based” program evaluation 

techniques, see Sparrow, Malcolm K., Governing 

Science. New Perspectives in Policing Bulletin. 

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

National Institute of Justice, 2011. 

38. See, e.g., Hipolit, Melissa, “Former Police 

Officer Exposes Chesterfield’s Ticket Quota Goals,” 

CBS 6 News at Noon, July 14, 2014. http://wtvr. 

com/2014/07/14/chesterfield-quota-investigation. 

39. “Whew! No More Traffic Ticket Quotas in 

Illinois,” CNBC News, Law Section, June 16, 2014. 

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101762636#. 

40. Scipione, Andrew P., “Foreword,” in Eterno, 

John A., and Eli B. Silverman, The Crime Numbers 

Game: Management by Manipulation. Boca Raton, 

Florida: CRC Press, 2012, p. xviii. 

41. Klockars, “Some Really Cheap Ways of 

Measuring What Really Matters,” p. 196. 

42. Ibid. 

43. Moore et al., Recognizing Value in Policing, pp. 

42-43. 

44. Ibid., p. 38. 

45. Moore and Braga, The “Bottom Line” of Policing. 

46. Ibid., p. 37. 

47. Langton et al., Victimizations Not Reported to 

the Police, 2006-2010, p. 5. 

48. Ibid. 

49. See note 6. 

50. Eterno and Silverman, The Crime Numbers 

Game. 

51. Ibid., pp. 85-104. 

52. Skogan, Wesley G., Police and Community in 

Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities. New York, New 

York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Chapter 3 

describes crime-recording practices used by 

Chicago police during the 1980s. 

53. Skogan, “Measuring What Matters: Crime, 

Disorder, and Fear,” p. 38. 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 35 

54. Eterno and Silverman, The Crime Numbers 

Game, pp. 11-12. See also the discussion of alleged 

manipulation of crime statistics by the NYPD, p. 

23, under “Integrity Issues Related to CompStat 

and Crime Reporting at the NYPD.” 

55. Rawlinson, Kevin, “Police Crime Figures 

Being Manipulated, Admits Chief Inspector,” The 

Guardian, Dec. 18, 2013. http://www.theguardian. 

com/uk-news/2013/dec/18/police-crime-figuresmanipulation-chief-inspector. 

56. Ibid. 

57. Bernstein, David, and Noah Isackson, 

“The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates,” 

Chicago Magazine, Special Report, Part 1: 

Apr. 7, 2014. Part 2: May 19, 2014. http://www. 

chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/ 

Chicago-crime-rates. 

58. Hutcheon, Paul, “Independent Watchdog 

Refuses to Endorse Police Statistics That Claim 

Crime Is at a Near 40-Year Low,” Sunday Herald, 

Aug. 17, 2014. http://www.heraldscotland.com/ 

news/home-news/independent-watchdogrefuses-to-endorse-police-statistics-that-claimcrime-is-at-a-ne.25062572. 

59, Eterno and Silverman, The Crime Numbers 

Game, pp. 9-12. 

60. Campbell, Donald T., Assessing the Impact 

of Planned Social Change. Occasional Paper 

Series, #8. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth 

College, The Public Affairs Center, Dec. 1976, p. 

49, cited in Eterno and Silverman, The Crime 

Numbers Game, p. 10. 

61. Campbell, Assessing the Impact of Planned 

Social Change, pp. 50-51. 

62. Vaughan, Diane, Controlling Unlawful 

Organizational Behavior: Social Structure 

and Corporate Misconduct. Chicago, Illinois: 

University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 55, 

summarizing Merton, Robert K., “Social 

Structure and Anomie,” in Robert K. Merton, 

Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged ed., 

New York: New York: The Free Press, 1968, pp. 

185-214. 

63. For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon, 

see Chapter 12, “Performance-Enhancing Risks,” 

in Sparrow, The Character of Harms. 

64. Zink, Robert, “The Trouble with Compstat,” 

PBA Magazine, Summer 2004, cited in Eterno 

and Silverman, The Crime Numbers Game, p. 27. 

65. Part I Index crimes, as defined under the 

Uniform Crime Reporting system, are aggravated 

assault, forcible rape, murder, robbery, arson, 

burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft. 

66. Bernstein and Isackson, “The Truth About 

Chicago’s Crime Rates,” Part 1. 

67. Bratton, “Great Expectations,” p. 15. 

68. Ibid., p. 17. 

69. Ibid., p. 17. 

70. Ibid., p. 11. 

71. Moore et al., Recognizing Value in Policing, 

p. 150. 
 

 

36 | New Perspectives in Policing 

72. Eterno and Silverman, The Crime Numbers 

Game, pp. 28-34. 

73. Rayman, Graham, “The NYPD Tapes: Inside 

Bed-Stuy’s 81st Precinct,” The Village Voice, May 

4, 2010; Rayman, Graham, “The NYPD Tapes, Part 

2: Ghost Town,” The Village Voice, May 11, 2010; 

Rayman, Graham, “The NYPD Tapes, Part 3: A 

Detective Comes Forward About Downgraded 

Sexual Assaults,” The Village Voice, June 8, 2010; 

Rayman, Graham, “The NYPD Tapes, Part 4: The 

Whistle Blower, Adrian Schoolcraft,” The Village 

Voice, June 15, 2010; Rayman, Graham, “The NYPD 

Tapes, Part 5: The Corroboration,” The Village 

Voice, Aug. 25, 2010; Rayman, Graham, “The NYPD 

Tapes Confirmed,” The Village Voice, Mar. 7, 2012. 

The entire series of articles is available online at 

http://www.villagevoice.com/specialReports/ 

the-nypd-tapes-the-village-voices-series-onadrian-schoolcraft-by-graham-rayman-4393217/. 

74. Rashbaum, William K., “Retired Officers Raise 

Questions on Crime Data,” The New York Times, 

Feb. 6, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/ 

nyregion/07crime.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 

75. Baker, Al, and Ray Rivera, “5 Officers Face 

Charges in Fudging of Statistics,” The New 

York Times, Oct. 15, 2010. http://www.nytimes. 

com/2010/10/16/nyregion/16statistics.html. 

76. Baker, Al, and William K. Rashbaum, 

“New York City to Examine Reliability of Its 

Crime Reports,” The New York Times, Jan. 5, 

2011. http://w w w.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/ 

nyregion/06crime.html?pagewanted=all. 

77. Kelley, David N., and Sharon L. McCarthy, 

“The Report of the Crime Reporting Review 

Committee to Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly 

Concerning CompStat Auditing,” Apr. 8, 2013. 

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/ 

public_information/crime_reporting_review_ 

committee_final_report_2013.pdf. 

78. Ibid., p. 18. 

79. Ibid., p. 17, note 43. 

80. Ibid., p. 21. 

81. Ibid., p. 52. 

82. Ibid., pp. 41-42. 

83. Ibid., p. 52. 

84. Ibid., p. 53. 

85. Ibid., p. 58. 

86. Skogan, “Measuring What Matters: Crime, 

Disorder, and Fear.” 

87. Ibid., p. 38. 

88. Kelley and McCarthy, “The Report of 

the Crime Reporting Review Committee to 

Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly Concerning 

CompStat Auditing,” p. 54. 

89. For a thorough analysis of this issue, see 

Chapter 4, “Distinguishing CompStat’s Effects,” 

in Behn, Robert D., The PerformanceStat 

Potential: A Leadership Strategy for Producing 

Results. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 
 

 

Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization | 37 

Press, 2014. Behn, who is a great admirer of 

PerformanceStat systems in general, surveys the 

literature on the subject, considers the 10 other 

explanations most commonly put forward as 

alternative explanations, and concludes that 

due to the limitations of the methods of social 

science, we will probably never know for sure 

what proportion of the crime reductions seen 

from 1994 onward was due to CompStat and what 

proportion is attributable to other factors. 

90. Kelley and McCarthy, “The Report of 

the Crime Reporting Review Committee to 

Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly Concerning 

CompStat Auditing,” p. 21. 

91. See note 1. 

92. See, e.g., Goldstein, Herman, “Improving 

Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach,” Crime 

& Delinquency 25 (April 1979): 236-258. 

93. See, e.g., Goldstein, “Improving Policing: A 

Problem-Oriented Approach”; Goldstein, Policing 

a Free Society. 

94. See, e.g., Moore and Braga, The “Bottom Line” 

of Policing; Moore et al., Recognizing Value in 

Policing. 

95. Skogan, “Measuring What Matters: Crime, 

Disorder, and Fear,” pp. 43-47. 

96. Ibid., pp. 47-50. 

97. Stephens, Darrel W. “Measuring What 

Matters,” in Measuring What Matters: Proceedings 

From the Policing Research Institute Meetings, 

edited by Robert H. Langworthy. Research Report. 

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

National Institute of Justice, July 1999. NCJ 170610, 

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/170610.pdf, 

pp. 55-64, at 58-59. 

98. Klockars, “Some Really Cheap Ways of 

Measuring What Really Matters,” pp. 202-204. 

99. Ibid., pp. 208-212. 

100. Moore and Braga, The “Bottom Line” of 

Policing, pp. 30-75. 

101. Ibid., pp. 80-82, table 3. 

102. Ibid., pp. 83-85, table 4. 

103. Sparrow, The Character of Harms, Chapter 8, 

“Invisible Risks.” 

104. Langton et al., Victimizations Not Reported 

to the Police, 2006-2010. 

105. Sparrow, The Character of Harms, Chapter 12, 

“Performance Enhancing Risks.” 

Author Note 

Malcolm K. Sparrow is professor of the practice 

of public management at the John F. Kennedy 

School of Government at Harvard University. This 

bulletin was written for the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety at the school. 
38 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Findings and conclusions in this publication are those of the authors and do not 

necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. 

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NCJ 248476

Members of the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety

Commissioner Anthony Batts, Baltimore 

Police Department

Professor David Bayley, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus), School of Criminal 

Justice, State University of New York at 

Albany 

Professor Anthony Braga, Senior Research 

Fellow, Program in Criminal Justice Policy 

and Management, John F. Kennedy School 

of Government, Harvard University; and 

Don M. Gottfredson Professor of EvidenceBased Criminology, School of Criminal 

Justice, Rutgers University

Chief Jane Castor, Tampa Police Department

Ms. Christine Cole (Facilitator), Executive Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy 

and Management, John F. Kennedy School 

of Government, Harvard University 

Commissioner Edward Davis, Boston 

Police Department (retired)

Chief Michael Davis, Director, Public Safet

Division, Northeastern University

Mr. Ronald Davis, Director, Office of 

Community Oriented Policing Services, 

United States Department of Justice

Ms. Madeline deLone, Executive Director, 

The Innocence Project

Dr. Richard Dudley, Clinical and Forensic 

Psychiatrist

Chief Edward Flynn, Milwaukee 

Police Department 

Colonel Rick Fuentes, Superintendent, New Jersey State Police 

District Attorney George Gascón, San 

Francisco District Attorney’s Office 

Mr. Gil Kerlikowske, Director, Office of 

National Drug Control Policy 

Professor John H. Laub, Distinguished 

University Professor, Department of 

Criminology and Criminal Justice, College of 

Behavioral and Social Sciences, University 

of Maryland, and former Director of the 

National Institute of Justice

Chief Susan Manheimer, San Mateo 

Police Department 

Superintendent Garry McCarthy, Chicago 

Police Department

Professor Tracey Meares, Walton Hale 

Hamilton Professor of Law, Yale Law School 

Dr. Bernard K. Melekian, Director, Office 

of Community Oriented Policing Services 

(retired), United States Department of 

Justice

Ms. Sue Rahr, Director, Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission

Commissioner Charles Ramsey,

Philadelphia Police Department

Professor Greg Ridgeway, Associate 

Professor of Criminology, University of 

Pennsylvania, and former Acting Director, 

National Institute of Justice

Professor David Sklansky, Yosef 

Osheawich Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law 

Mr. Sean Smoot, Director and Chief Legal Counsel, Police Benevolent and Protective 

Association of Illinois 

Professor Malcolm Sparrow, Professor 

of Practice of Public Management, John F. 

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard 

University 

Mr. Darrel Stephens, Executive Director, 

Major Cities Chiefs Association 

Mr. Christopher Stone, President, Open Society Foundations

Mr. Richard Van Houten, President, Fort 

Worth Police Officers Association

Lieutenant Paul M. Weber, Los Angeles 

Police Department

Professor David Weisburd, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, 

Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University; 

and Distinguished Professor, Department 

of Criminology, Law and Society, George 

Mason University

Dr. Chuck Wexler, Executive Director, 

Police Executive Research Forum

y 

*NCJ~248476*
 

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