Police Performance As Symbolic Politics? Public Recognition and the Value of Awards

Abstract

What constitutes “good” performance in a law enforcement agency, who decides, and how does public recognition of that performance change how an agency performs? This study uses a quasi-experimental design and propensity-score matching model to assess the impact of a law enforcement agency’s status as a finalist for the annual Cisco/International Chiefs of Police Association (IACP) Community Policing Award on performance in future years, as measured by crime clearance rates. It is found that after comparing the treated group (finalist agencies) with the untreated group (non-finalist nearest-neighbor agencies), there is no meaningful difference in crime clearance rates. This unexpected finding establishes that the public recognition of finalist status by the Department of Justice, which promotes finalist agencies as exemplars of best practices in community policing, does not impact the subsequent performance of those agencies. Additionally, the results of the model suggest that the impact of symbolic politics and social construction on the award finalist selection process and the choice by DOJ to promote the practices of those agencies should be explored. Questions are also raised as to the utility of crime clearance rates as a performance measure, and future avenues for research in each area are proposed.

Keywords:

• local government
• public administration
• performance management

Note

Notes

1 While a difference-in-difference estimator was considered as a methodological alternative, the functionality of that model relies on data that covers both pre- and post-treatment periods, and is intended to gauge the change over time of a given variable across a group of units See: Bertrand, Duflo, and Mullainathan (2004); Abadie (2005); Imbens and Wooldridge (2009). Since this research is intended to measure the relationship between an agency receiving a prestigious award and future performance as compared to similar agencies, and not on the performance of a given agency before and after receiving an award, a propensity score matching model was determined to be the best choice.