Size isn't everything: Understanding the relationship between police workforce and crime problems

IF 3.3 1区社会学 Q1 CRIMINOLOGY & PENOLOGY

Journal of Criminal Justice Pub Date : 2024-09-21 DOI:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2024.102291

Eon Kim , Kate Bowers , Dan Birks , Shane D. Johnson

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

If and how policing affects crime has long been studied. On the relationship between police force size and crime, different authors come to different conclusions. This study examines the relationship between police resourcing, including workforce size, structure and stability over time using data for 42 police forces in the UK over a 13-year period.

We construct two novel panel datasets. The first comprises measures of police workforce Size, Structure and Stability. The second provides measures of both crime frequency and crime severity. Issues of endogeneity make the modelling of the police-crime association complicated. Consequently, we analyse the data using a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model which is capable of forecasting a temporal sequence of the interdependencies between police-crime relationships.

Changes in total police personnel play an important role in reducing both crime frequency and severity, but the findings are more nuanced than this. Results highlight that the structure and stability of police organisations are important although these impacts are not always the same for crime volume and crime severity. We find that increases in frontline (non-sworn) support staff are associated with reductions in crime, while turnover rates of police staff are associated with increases in crime. In contrast, changes to the number of sworn police officers do not appear to be a good predictor of crime volume.

The findings suggest that investment in frontline support staff and the development of strategies to retain skills and knowledge by reducing staff turnover may be efficient approaches for Police Forces to maximise the impact on crime of their workforce in resource-pressed policing settings. While previous research has found that police force size has a limited effect on crime, our findings indicate that more nuanced measurements of police resourcing are necessary to understand how police impact upon crime risk. The idea of police forces using basic officer-to-population ratios to make staffing decisions appears outdated and over-simplistic.

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规模并不代表一切：了解警察队伍与犯罪问题之间的关系

长期以来，人们一直在研究警务是否以及如何影响犯罪。关于警力规模与犯罪之间的关系，不同的作者得出了不同的结论。本研究利用英国 42 支警队 13 年间的数据，研究了警力资源配置（包括警力规模、结构和稳定性）之间的关系。第一个数据集包括警察队伍的规模、结构和稳定性。第二个数据集提供了犯罪频率和犯罪严重程度的衡量指标。内生性问题使得警察与犯罪的关联建模变得复杂。因此，我们使用面板向量自回归（PVAR）模型对数据进行分析，该模型能够预测警察与犯罪之间相互依存关系的时间序列。研究结果突出表明，警察组织的结构和稳定性非常重要，尽管这些因素对犯罪数量和犯罪严重程度的影响并不总是相同。我们发现，前线（非军警）辅助人员的增加与犯罪率的下降有关，而警务人员的更替率与犯罪率的上升有关。研究结果表明，在警力资源紧张的情况下，对一线辅助人员进行投资并制定通过降低人员流动率来保留技能和知识的策略，可能是警察部队最大限度地发挥其警力对犯罪的影响的有效方法。以往的研究发现，警力规模对犯罪的影响有限，而我们的研究结果表明，有必要对警察资源配置进行更细致的衡量，以了解警察如何影响犯罪风险。警察部队使用基本的警员与人口比例来做出人员配置决策的想法似乎已经过时，而且过于简单化。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Criminal Justice CRIMINOLOGY & PENOLOGY-

CiteScore

6.90

自引率

9.10%

发文量

审稿时长

23 days

期刊介绍： The Journal of Criminal Justice is an international journal intended to fill the present need for the dissemination of new information, ideas and methods, to both practitioners and academicians in the criminal justice area. The Journal is concerned with all aspects of the criminal justice system in terms of their relationships to each other. Although materials are presented relating to crime and the individual elements of the criminal justice system, the emphasis of the Journal is to tie together the functioning of these elements and to illustrate the effects of their interactions. Articles that reflect the application of new disciplines or analytical methodologies to the problems of criminal justice are of special interest. Since the purpose of the Journal is to provide a forum for the dissemination of new ideas, new information, and the application of new methods to the problems and functions of the criminal justice system, the Journal emphasizes innovation and creative thought of the highest quality.