An environment-adjusted evaluation of local police eectiveness: evidence from a conditional Data Envelopment Analysis approach

Hard data alone are not sufficient to evaluate local police effectiveness in the new age of community policing. Citizens can provide useful feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses of police operations. However, citizen satisfaction indicators typically fail to accurately convey the multidimensional nature of local policing and account for characteristics that are non-controllable for the local police departments. To construct a measure of perceived effectiveness of community oriented police corpses that accounts for both multidimensional aspects of local policing and exogenous in uences, this paper proposes the use of a multivariate conditional, robust order-m version of a non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis approach with no inputs. We show the potentiality of the method by constructing and analyzing effectiveness indicators of local police corpses in Belgium. The findings suggest that perceived police effectiveness is significantly conditioned by the demographic and socioeconomic environment.