Can Performance Management Best Practices Help Reduce Crime?

Abstract

As performance management systems gain popularity in police agencies, they are increasingly being criticized for their ineffectiveness at reducing crime and for encouraging abuse of authority. Scholars and practitioners, however, argue that these systems can be effective if they are implemented properly with the use of best practices. This article contributes to this debate by evaluating the impact of performance management systems and associated best practices on improving police performance. An analysis of primary survey data of 308 U.S. police agencies shows that performance management systems are effective tools in helping reduce crime across almost all crime categories. However, the best practices of performance reporting to citizens and providing discretion to officers have no significant impact on crime reduction, while consulting officers in the target‐setting process has a negative impact on police performance.

Performance Management Meets Red Tape: Bounded Rationality, Negativity Bias, and Resource Dependence

“…Further, perceptions of behavior may differ from perceptions about other aspects like administrative systems. Second, previous studies have debated whether benchmarking (i.e., providing information about localities’ positions relative to their peers) encourages improvement or convergence in local performance (Gerrish and Spreen 2017; Pasha 2018). Although this study's evidence is too short term to produce conclusive results, our findings may support both convergence and improvement; on average, there was an improvement in performance among low performers, and, as a result, the performance gaps across localities diminished.…”

Police Performance As Symbolic Politics? Public Recognition and the Value of Awards

“…The results of this study constitute an effort to contribute to the ongoing discussion about efficacy and effectiveness in policing interventions and their ability to reduce crime (Pasha, 2018;Pollack, 2017;Saunders, Robbins, & Ober, 2017). The first and most important contribution to this literature reached herein is that, according to a propensity score model using crime clearance rates as an indicator of performance, there is no evidence to suggest that police departments who were finalists for the IACP Community Policing Award have better crime clearance rates in the years following their selection than similar departments who were not finalists.…”

“…Public administration scholarship has developed frameworks and theories to better measure the performance of public agencies (Bozeman & Moulton, 2011;Moynihan, 2008Moynihan, , 2015O'Toole & Meier, 2014), as well as to assess the factors that contribute to better performance by those organizations (Hvidman & Andersen, 2014;Langbein & Stazyk, 2013;Span, Luijkx, Schols, & Schalk, 2011). This scholarship includes work on law enforcement agencies and indicates that such measurement is possible, as well as valuable when assessing whether law enforcement agencies are meeting their constituents needs (Ammons & Madej, 2018;Bromberg, Charbonneau, & Smith, 2018;Gorby, 2013;Pasha, 2018;Shane, 2010).…”

Relative Managerial Networking and Performance: The Moderating Role of Environmental Context

“…Organizational performance is likely to be produced by an autoregressive process. In this study, we considered the lagged dependent variable (LDV) model to control for organizational history (Oberfield 2014; Pasha 2018). As an identification strategy, we relied on the generalized method of moments (GMM) to estimate the lagged dependent models (Hansen 1982) because the LDVs are correlated with individual‐specific effects, and thus conventional ordinary least squares estimation of the dynamic model would give upward biased results (Anderson and Hsiao 1981, 1982).…”