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4 Crime Sci. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/crimsci4 and id is 1 raw text is: Tiwana et al. Crime Science (2015) 4:1 DOI 10.1186/s40163-014-0011-4 Crime Science Police performance measurement: an annotated bibliography Neena Tiwana*, Gary Bass and Graham Farrell Abstract This study provides information to assist those involved in performance measurement in police organisations. The strategies used to identify the literature are described. Thematic sections cover; general overviews; methodological issues; performance management in other industries; national, international and cross-national studies; frameworks (e.g. Compstat; the Balanced Scorecard); criticisms (particularly unintended consequences); crime-specific measures; practitioner guides; performance evaluation of individual staff; police department plans and evaluations; annotated bibliographies in related areas, and; other literature. Our discussion offers two conclusions: the measures best aligned with performance are typically more expensive, while most operational data should only provide contextual information; the philosophy of open governance should be pursued to promote transparency, accountability and communication to improve police performance. Keywords: Policing; Performance management; Police performance management; Performance indicators; Compstat; Balanced scorecard Background Performance measurement is an issue of growing import- ance in the public and private sectors in many countries. It is a complex area in which there is no consensus over either the form or nature of what should be measured, how measurement should take place, what different indi- cators mean, and how they are best used to promote im- proved performance. However, there is consensus on the fact that performance measures are a potentially powerful policy instrument, with potentially tremendous impact on police work. At the same time there is an emerging consensus that the development and use of performance measures can be problematic. It is this paradox - the difficulty and potential pitfalls of wielding a powerful instrument - that makes the topic problematic. The nature of policing means that, while its perform- ance measures overlap with those in other industries, they also raise significantly different methodological and substantive issues. Hence the justification for this annotated bibliography is twofold. First, there is a large body of specialised work on this topic that has not, to our knowledge, been systematically collated. Second, * Correspondence: ntiwana@sfu.ca School of Criminology, Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby V5A 1S6, Canada 1Ei Springer there are issues particular to policing that are not ad- dressed in other annotated bibliographies on performance measurement. The concluding section contains our brief reflections on what works. It distills the evidence from the studies contained herein in an effort to identify the key ingre- dients of a recipe for success in the development and use of performance measures for policing. We recom- mend caution as there are few good indicators of per- formance and those that exist tend to be the more difficult and expensive to collect, often based on surveys. The more readily available and cheaper indicators based on routinely-collected operational and administrative data can provide informative contextual indicators but are often partial, at best, indicators of performance. There is also evidence that performance measures can lead to unexpected side-effects, including manipulation of sta- tistics and resources by police officers in an effort to meet performance expectations. Hence our conclusion is that the philosophy of open governance should be pursued, making many contextual indicators widely available to promote transparency, comparison, account- ability and communication, alongside a relatively small set of core performance indicators. © 2014 Tiwana et al., licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.

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