Measures of Effectiveness for Crime Reduction Programs

This paper describes some measures commonly used to evaluate anticrime programs and proposes directions for research on improved measures. Since the police are usually seen as the main crime control agency, the paper first discusses the differences between evaluating the police and evaluating crime control programs. Five measures used to evaluate such programs are then analyzed: crime rate, clearance rate, arrest rate, police response time, and crime seriousness index. The last measure suggests the direction for the development of an improved measure of crime: the development of a more complete taxonomy of crime and the discrimination between and explication of the different types of harm caused by crime.

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