Evaluation of Crime Control Programs

A few months ago a colleague–who's been in the "crime business" for about as long as I have–asked me to provide a citation from this monograph, which I wrote while a staff member of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (the predecessor to the National Institute of Justice). I found the citation he was looking for, but also began to read the monograph for the first time in decades. I was pleasantly surprised; although it might be viewed as a "period piece," it contains some nuggets that might be worth considering. To some extent nothing has changed (plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose) but to some extent a lot has changed. [NB: The only changes I made to the monograph itself are the correction of typographic errors and reformatting, which led to a revised table of contents.] Good intentions sometimes get waylaid, in government as elsewhere. The foreword to the monograph starts out by saying that is "one of a series to be issued," but to my knowledge this was the only one that was ever written. Among the issues discussed in the monograph are the relationship between the agency and the evaluator, crime displacement, crime data, measures of effectiveness, and conduct of the evaluation. A review of these issues is instructive. • Issues related to the relationship between the evaluator and practitioner still are there, but to a much lesser extent. There was little incentive for (and to some extent, little stomach for) experimentation in police departments in the 1970s, and it took a courageous police chief to start the process, as Clarence Kelley did with the now-famous Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment. Nowadays most police administrators–especially in larger cities–are accustomed to having researchers in their agencies; in fact, many of them (and most of their staff) have advanced degrees and/or have conducted similar research themselves. • Issues related to displacement are still important. Moreover, their importance may have increased over the years, because we now have the tools–in the form of geographical information systems–that can provide graphic representations of the impact of a program on moving crime from one location to another. • We still have problems with crime data. Although the National Crime Victimization Survey now supplements the Uniform Crime Reporting System, the NCVS cannot be used to evaluate local programs, forcing reliance on the UCR with all its faults. The slow …