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A F R E S H A P P R O A C H T O M A N A G E M E N T ON YOUR WATCH Carole Moore A 12-year veteran of police work, Carole Moore has served in patrol, forensics, crime prevention and criminal investigations, and has extensive training in many law enforcement disciplines. She is the author of "The Last Place You'd Look: True Stories of Missing Persons and the People Who Search for Them" (Rowman & Littlefield, Spring 2011). She welcomes comments at carolemoore_biz@yahoo.com. Keep up with Moore online: www.carolemoore.com Amazon: www.amazon.com/-/e/ B004APO40S 50 Law Enforcement Technology March 2015 www.officer.com Can someone else figure out your effectiveness? No. And here's why. A recent article in the financial pub- lication WalletPop caught my eye with a concept associated with financial dealings, but not tradi- tionally 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-a-vis the cost. Here is a portion of what the 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 expendi- tures on police forces after normalizing the data by poverty rate, unemployment rate and median household income." What follows is an interesting, but flawed, look at police effectiveness against the cost of keeping a police officer on the streets of a par- ticular city. The study examined the 110 most populous cities in the U.S. By using their methodology, they determined that the city with the lowest crime rate of those studied, Providence, came in 84 th in the unadjusted ROI, by spending $460 per officer. At the bottom of the crime rate rank- ings stood Birmingham, with an unadjusted rate of 9.93 percent and a ranking of $404. Because this study contains so many num- bers, I won't go into exhaustive detail. 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 cit- ies 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 interest- ing 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 juris- diction's ROI. 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 investiga- tions when the population is so liquid. Another factor missing from the equa- tion 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.), geogra- phy and square mileage, and educational and training requirements. While an interesting concept, I don't think one can measure effectiveness by simply calcu- lating a few numbers and conjuring a ranking. Too many factors affect efficiency, a fluid con- cept at best. The bottom line to me: measuring police efficiency against the taxpayers' expen- ditures should encompass many more variables to achieve better accuracy. ■