Issues and Controversies in Policing Today by Johnny Nhan

Author:Johnny Nhan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Using Statistics and Clearance Rates to

Gauge Police Performance

More generally, measures of police success come into question when looking at the impact of police on crime statistics. Police researchers James Q. Wilson and Barbara Boland noted major problems when employing clearance rates to measure police impact on crime.[12] First, departments differ on what is considered an actual clearance. For instance, some departments count an offense as cleared only when a suspect or suspects are taken into custody that they have enough evidence to bring forward charges. However, oftentimes suspects confesses to committing crimes other than the one they were arrested for. Some scholars have even pointed out that these confessions, which may boost clearance rates, are made by suspects wanting to please captors.

Second, the researchers find it difficult to draw conclusions of deterrence in which police directly caused the person to be arrested. According to researchers, police do not have control over a lot of factors that may lead a person to get caught, such as willingness of citizens to report the crime and identify suspects. In other words, if everyone started reporting crime and providing police with evidence that lead to an arrest, that would cause an increase in clearance rates. Third, researchers have difficulty drawing a connection between causal inferences of deterrence and the number of police officers per capita and crime. This was backed by the Kansas City Preventative Patrol Experiment.

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