Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0001-7130-2012

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2020

Abstract

In recent years, the national conversation in criminal justice has centered on police. Are police using excessive force? Should they be monitored more closely? Do technology and artificial intelligence improve policing? The implied core question across these national debates is whether police are effective at their jobs. Yet we have not explored how effective police are or determined how best to measure police effectiveness.

This Article endeavors to measure how effective police are at their principal function—solving crime. The metric most commonly used to measure police effectiveness at crime-solving is a “clearance rate:” the proportion of reported crimes for which police arrest a person and refer them for prosecution. But clearance rates are inadequate for many reasons, including the fact that they are highly manipulable. This Article therefore provides a set of new metrics that have never been used systematically to study police effectiveness—referred to as “criminal accountability” metrics. Criminal Accountability examines the full course of a crime to determine whether crime that is committed is detected and ultimately resolved by police. Taking into account the prevalence and the number of crimes solved by police, the proportion of crimes solved in America is dramatically lower than we realize. Only with a clearer conversation, rooted in accurate data about the effectiveness of the American police system, can we attempt a path toward increased criminal accountability and public safety.

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