An AHP/DEA Methodology for the Public Safety Evaluation

Public safety may be endangered by events that could lead to huge losses including human life, injuries or property damage, such as crime or disaster. In addition, there are some factors that affect public safety, such as the ratio of temporary residents, per capita GDP, etc. This paper aims at integrating Non-discretionary variable in data envelopment analysis (DEA-NDSC) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to evaluate the public safety of cities in China. The proposed AHP/DEA methodology uses the AHP to determine the weights of criteria to assess each item under each criterion, and the DEA-NDSC method to evaluate the efficiency of safety services. A cities’ case of public safety perception is employed to illustrate the proposed method. The results show that the method can effectively and reasonably evaluate the public safety of the city. This research also offers a simple enough and applicable approach to a number of multiple criteria decision making problems.