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63 Police J. 361 (1990)
Indicators for Assessing the Efficiency of Police Deployment

handle is hein.journals/policejl63 and id is 369 raw text is: ALAN MARLOW BSc Chief Superintendent, Bedfordshire Police. INDICATORS FOR ASSESSING THE EFFICIENCY OF POLICE DEPLOYMENT Introduction The now legendary Home Office Circular 114/83 made it clear that the efficient deployment of resources was a fundamental responsibility of Chief Officers. The criterion of efficiency requires that the supply of police resources be matched to the demands for police services. Force establishments have been derived through bargaining in economic environments of growth and constraint and thus largely reflect a series of spasmodic gains argued upon differing factors and needs. In other words, a Police establishment is derived from a series of historical resource allocation decisions, which may or may not correspond to policing 'needs' that presently exist. What a Chief Officer has, may or may not be fair or adequate, but what he does with Force resources must be linked to the policing demands of the area. Changing demographic factors and style of policing may result in imbalances in the apportionment of police resources. This paper describes an attempt using available indicators, to assess the efficiency of police deployment in a county Force with a mixed urban and rural population. The appropriateness of measures of the demands for police services is also discussed. Methodology The smallest spatial units within the Force are 'beats' and each beat can be related to statistics of reported crime and total 'incidents'. It was also possible to calculate the number of police 'man hours' allocated to each beat. Population data were obtained from the county council and, in turn, expressed in terms of the beat unit. The information was used to create a database for micro-computer analysis. Measures of 'Demands' There were two available measures of publicly generated 'demands' for Police services, which will also be available to most Forces crime statistics and total 'incident statistics', both of which have their shortcomings as indicators. i) Crime Statistics In most instances, whether a crime is reported or not depends upon an individual's decision to communicate the facts to the Police. The British Crime Survey indicated that, on average, only 20 per cent of the total crime October 1990