A recent article in the financial publication Wallet Pop caught my eye with a concept associated with financial dealings, but not traditionally applied to law enforcement: return on investment, known as ROI.
Basically, ROI employs a mathematical formula that determines the value or gain on investment vis-à-vis the cost. Here is a portion of what article’s writer, Richie Bernardo, says the study accomplished, “We did so by calculating each city’s ROI on police spending based on crime rates and per-capita expenditures on police forces after normalizing the data by poverty rate, unemployment rate and median household income.”
What follows is an interesting, but in my opinion somewhat flawed, look at police effectiveness against the cost of keeping a police officer on the streets of a particular city.
The study examined the 110 most populous cities in the U.S., from New York City to Los Angeles, from Flint to Baton Rouge and all the flyover areas in between. By using their methodology, they determined that the city with the lowest crime rate of those studied, Providence, came in 84th in the unadjusted ROI, by spending $460 per officer. At the bottom of the crime rate rankings stood Birmingham, with an unadjusted rate of 9.93 percent and a ranking of $404.
Because this study contains so many numbers, I won’t go into exhaustive detail because, if you’re like me, after awhile, they all start all running together. But the final rankings — and point of the article (which also contains some enlightening interviews with experts, mostly culled from academia) — are worth mentioning. According to the report, among the cities reviewed, Washington, D.C. has the lowest ranking when it comes to ROI ($978 per officer with a crime rate of 5.57 percent) and Flint comes in at the top of the adjusted list with a crime rate of 8.96 percent and a spending per capita of $269. (Note: the adjusted rate takes economic and sociological circumstances into account.)
In actuality, the city that spends the lowest amount per officer to put its men and women on the streets is Louisville, with only $155 in spending, while Washington, D.C., spends the most, whether adjusted or not. Other cities that join Louisville in spending per capita (unadjusted by other factors) were in this order: Lincoln, Lexington and Virginia Beach. Other high dollar cities include Ft. Lauderdale, St. Louis and Orlando. I think this is interesting because while this study was meant to look at police efficiency, what it doesn’t take into account are all of the factors that affect a jurisdiction’s ROI.
For example, any city with a large transient population —like Orlando, home of several theme parks, and Norfolk with its military bases — will skew the results. I policed in a highly transient area and it’s much more difficult to pursue investigations when the population is so liquid.
Another factor missing from the equation is cost of living. Areas like Washington, D.C., and New York City (which, by the way, has one of the lowest crime rates on the list and is near the top in ROI) are expensive places to live, therefore one must spend more money to keep officers on the street. Other components neglected by the report are the more specialized services some departments have (missing persons bureaus, etc.), geography and square mileage and educational and training requirements.
While an interesting concept, I don’t think one can measure effectiveness by simply calculating a few numbers and conjuring a ranking. Too many factors affect efficiency, a fluid concept at best. The bottom line to me: measuring police efficiency against the taxpayers’ expenditures should encompass many more variables to achieve better accuracy.
