Читать книгу Police in America - Steven G. Brandl - Страница 26

Assessing police performance is important so that corrections and improvements can be made. With police work, however, it is extremely difficult to measure good performance. For example, crime prevention is a good goal, but how do you measure crimes that do not occur? It is simply impossible for the police to accurately say that they prevented X number of crimes during the past year. Often comparisons are made to the number of crimes that occurred the previous year, but there is nothing inherently meaningful about a previous year’s numbers. If there were 100 crimes last year but only 90 this year, is that a police success? Is it possible the number of crimes may decline from year to year not because the police are effective but because citizens reported crimes to the police less often? If the number of homicides went down but the number of shootings stayed the same, is that a police success? Sometimes the number of arrests made by the police is used as an indicator of performance; the reasoning is that making more arrests equals better performance. The problem with this reasoning is that if an arrest was made, it means that a crime was not prevented. Additionally, an arrest may not be the best or most effective way of handling a particular incident. Indeed, identifying accurate measurements of good policing has been, and remains, problematic for the police. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify specific examples of good policing practices and good qualities and actions of police officers. Such examples are provided throughout this book in the Good Policing features.

Photo 1.6 The media tend to distort the realities of policing. Some people argue that the intent of the media is more to entertain than to educate.

AP Photo/Detroit News, Steve Perez