An Economic evaluation of inputs and outputs in policing: problems in efficiency and measurement

The new Labour government has recently instigated an initiative to establish whether English and Welsh police forces should be ranked into groups based on an efficiency measure. The estimation techniques proposed in the Public Service Productivity Panel (2000) report in order to rank the efficiency of forces are Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). These procedures allow for multiple input/output configurations in a cost or production model in order to obtain efficiency scores. In order to produce comparative efficiency measures, however, it is essential that the services provided by police forces (the outputs or outcomes) be related to the resources (inputs) utilised by the forces in delivering these outputs (outcomes). A particular problem, however, is that policing includes many inputs and outputs (outcomes) that could potentially be utilised in an efficiency model using DEA and SFA. Hence, this paper considers the problems associated with measuring relative police force efficiency given that a vast number of potential indicators must be reduced to a handful to allow feasible estimation. In addition, it discusses the input and output variables utilised in the first 'official' analysis of English and Welsh police force efficiency (Demonstration Project (Home Office (2001)).