A composite index of citizen satisfaction with local police services

This paper proposes a non-parametric methodology to construct composite scores of citizen satisfaction with local police corpses. More precisely, the paper advocates a custom made version of the popular Data Envelopment Analysis approach, also referred to as the ‘Benefit-of-the-Doubt’-model. The key advantage of this approach is that it weights the citizen satisfaction rates with the multiple local police functions and tasks into the composite score in an endogenous manner, thereby allowing for different values and interpretations of ‘good local policing’ among police corpses. The methodology is illustrated with citizen satisfaction data on a sample of Belgian local police corpses.