The Economic Evaluation of Policing Activity: An Application of a Hybrid Methodology

This paper advances a hybrid police cost function that synthesises the proactive/preventive and response/reactive methodologies from the criminology literature. The model presents a coherent estimation process that can help in the allocation of scarce resources to police forces and also enable economists, government organisations and criminologists to assess the scale and technical efficiency of forces. This hybrid model uses response survey data for a sample of English and Welsh police forces in which relative efficiency rankings are contrasted with relative performance measures produced by the Audit Commission. We find that there are considerable divergences in police force's scale and technical efficiency during 1997/98 and 1998/99 utilising non-parametric techniques.