Assessing Efficiency of Local Police Agency Using Data Envelopment Analysis

The purpose of this paper is to measure the relative efficiency of the police agencies in Korea with data collected from 2018 to 2020, using data envelopment analysis (DEA), as put forward by Charnes et al., which is used to construct a scalar measure of efficiency for all police agencies. The results of this study can be used to assist police agencies in delivering better and more efficient services to the community. The analytical results based on DEA identify potentially weak and strong police agencies on policing performance, their efficient benchmarking, and the levels of clear-ups that would make inefficient police agencies efficient. We could suggest that higher levels of the police force are associated with higher performance efficiency against crimes. But, it is a little hard to say that higher levels of the police force can keep the local police agencies efficient without explaining the contribution of other input variables to criminal arrest and prevention. On the other hand, our analysis presents that differences in operating environments and socioeconomic factors do not have a significant influence on the efficiency of local police agencies. But, it is necessary to note that we need to examine the effect of environments and socioeconomic factors on crime to create the better-policing performance.