Enhancing Social Security Aspect through Conceptualizing Police Services with KPIs

Services of Police Department are aimed at providing a safe neighborhood to the residents which involves tasks like ensuring law and order situation in the area by reducing instances of theft, burglary, murders, kidnappings; reducing accidents by making sure that people abide by the rules

This is a challenging task, for sure as the job can range from as minor a thing as ‘imposing fine on someone who was driving rashly’ to something as complicated and entangled as ‘solving a murder mystery’. Performing such wide variety of tasks with equal ease, accuracy and perfection asks for a commendable degree of exactness, logic and promptness in approach. The reaction time needs to be very much within permissible limits to avoid the blowing of situation ‘out of proportion’.

To make the staff members capable of handling any/all situations, appropriate training should be imparted. This would not only span introducing and improving the ‘equipment handling capabilities of staff members’ but also ‘developing and building on the psychological skills’ as dealing with hard-core criminals requires both inferring from non-verbal communication as well as can sometimes destabilize the mental strength of the interrogator. 

Consequently, training is an expensive task and at times, consumes lion’s share of the budget. Drawing from this fact, one discovers that it has to be an expensive task; so organization of effective and useful arrangements is something that is an essential part of operations.

Making way through the mentioned pitfalls to address the problems being faced by public can be done by structuring a bunch of indicators that mirror department’s progress. One can frame these parameters in the form of groups, each such group called a perspective. The usual ones employed relate to- financial, Customers, Internal Operations and Learning and Innovation.

However, one can modify these, as seen necessary. For instance, when it is about monitoring the Police services, the aspects to be utilized include- ‘Resource Allocation perspective’, ‘Public satisfaction and Efficacy Perspective’, ‘Internal Operations Perspective’ and ‘Crime Reduction Perspective’.

Resource Allocation can be measured with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like ‘average amount spent on training, fleet, maintenance’, ‘expenditure incurred for buying and maintaining equipments’ and ‘cash: non-cash resource ratio’. Internal Operations can be improved with ‘response time’, ‘case resolving success ratio’ and ‘duration for which training and skill-development sessions were provided’. Public satisfaction and Efficacy can be analyzed with ‘overall criminal offence rate’, ‘satisfied residents percentage’ and ‘counter terrorism index’. Lastly, Crime Reduction Perspective can be obtained with indicators such as drop in crime ‘against person’, ‘against property’ and ‘youth involvement’. Moving on the BSC path can help the group effectively monitor movements, which in turn can be used in correcting and minimizing the deviations from the actual values.