Police and judicial efficiency in Colombia

Abstract


 
 
 According to socioeconomic theories of criminal behavior, crime rates can be reduced by increasing the probability and severity of punishment. In this line, the public force and the judicial sector play an important role depending on their performance. This document analyzes this performance for each department of Colombia in 2018. Using the technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), the study found that police and judicial efficiency must be balanced, since in most cases, if a department has an acceptable police efficiency, it has a bad judicial efficiency performance or vice versa. At large, police efficiency had better performance than judicial efficiency in Colombia.