"Public Policy and Public Evaluations of Justice System Performance," in John
Gardiner and Michael Mulkey (eds.) Crime and Criminal Justice: Issues in Public
Policy. Lexington Books/D.C. Heath, 1975, Chapter 5, 51-58.
One of the major developments of the past decade of research and evaluations in crime control has
been the emergence of a “consumer perspective” in the measurement of the efficiency and effectiveness of
criminal justice agencies. This perspective has developed in response to dissatisfaction with traditional
measures of institutional performance, the growing realization that those agencies touch our lives in many
ways other than through the crime rate, and an emerging sensitivity to the differential distribution of safety
and public satisfaction that criminal justice agencies foster. The consumer orientation toward performance
measurement has been expressed in several ways: through the use of systematic interviews to evaluate
the outcome of citizens’ encounters with criminal justice organizations, through the incorporation of
interviews with affected populations into designs for the evaluation of specific institutional reforms, and
through the utilization of large-scale sample surveys to investigate the effect of existing variations in agency
activity upon public attitudes and perceptions.
Thus it is probably not accidental that it is the police–the element of the law enforcement system most
vulnerable to such charges–who have done the most experimentation with citizen evaluation programs, and
whose activities have been the most closely monitored in this fashion by outside observers. Most of our
experience with programs to evaluate citizens’ experiences, test the effects of reform and predict the effects
of proposed policies on the basis of current patterns of public satisfaction and dissatisfaction has come
from research on the police function. The models employed to analyze police operations are general ones,
however. With some modification, they could be employed to evaluate the performance of other aspects of
the criminal justice system. This essay reviews some of the applications of citizen evaluation techniques in
the area of law enforcement, including projects measuring the effects of police-citizen encounters, the
consequences of organizational reform, and the correlates of inter-jurisdictional variations in law-
enforcement policy. It concludes that, while several provocative empirical propositions about citizen
satisfaction have emerged, the research literature is conceptually deficient. Neither the theoretical nor the
practical bases for the selection of performance indicators have been clarified.
Gardiner and Michael Mulkey (eds.) Crime and Criminal Justice: Issues in Public
Policy. Lexington Books/D.C. Heath, 1975, Chapter 5, 51-58.
One of the major developments of the past decade of research and evaluations in crime control has
been the emergence of a “consumer perspective” in the measurement of the efficiency and effectiveness of
criminal justice agencies. This perspective has developed in response to dissatisfaction with traditional
measures of institutional performance, the growing realization that those agencies touch our lives in many
ways other than through the crime rate, and an emerging sensitivity to the differential distribution of safety
and public satisfaction that criminal justice agencies foster. The consumer orientation toward performance
measurement has been expressed in several ways: through the use of systematic interviews to evaluate
the outcome of citizens’ encounters with criminal justice organizations, through the incorporation of
interviews with affected populations into designs for the evaluation of specific institutional reforms, and
through the utilization of large-scale sample surveys to investigate the effect of existing variations in agency
activity upon public attitudes and perceptions.
Thus it is probably not accidental that it is the police–the element of the law enforcement system most
vulnerable to such charges–who have done the most experimentation with citizen evaluation programs, and
whose activities have been the most closely monitored in this fashion by outside observers. Most of our
experience with programs to evaluate citizens’ experiences, test the effects of reform and predict the effects
of proposed policies on the basis of current patterns of public satisfaction and dissatisfaction has come
from research on the police function. The models employed to analyze police operations are general ones,
however. With some modification, they could be employed to evaluate the performance of other aspects of
the criminal justice system. This essay reviews some of the applications of citizen evaluation techniques in
the area of law enforcement, including projects measuring the effects of police-citizen encounters, the
consequences of organizational reform, and the correlates of inter-jurisdictional variations in law-
enforcement policy. It concludes that, while several provocative empirical propositions about citizen
satisfaction have emerged, the research literature is conceptually deficient. Neither the theoretical nor the
practical bases for the selection of performance indicators have been clarified.
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
Police-Public Encounters Abstracts