Police Efficiency in the Presence of Bad Outputs: A Study of Peru

• In Event: Crime Prevention and the Police Organization

Abstract

One of the main goals of any police force is to provide safety and security efficiently. The following paper examines the performance of police forces in the presence of bad outputs in Peruvian municipalities. We employed a two-stage data envelopment analysis model to determine the level of efficiency of police. We consider inputs such as labor and capital as inputs, patrolling as output, and a proxy measure of high levels of crime as our bad output. The results reveal that less than half of the municipalities in our sample were efficient in preventing crime, while the remaining municipalities need to increase their performance in preventing crime. This suggests that the police in Peru must reassess its organizational structure at the municipal level in order to improve their efficiency.

Author

• Erik Alda, American University