Summary
"What operational practices of the Vancouver Police Department should be measured as part of an evaluation of organizational effectiveness from the perspective of members of key stakeholder groups? Currently the VPD's Mission Statement is: The Vancouver Police Department provides professional and effective community-based policing through partnerships focusing on prevention, enforcement, investigative and problem-solving strategies (Vancouver Police Department, n.d.). However, there is no framework in place to determine the organization's ability to achieve its stated mission. This lack of an evaluative framework makes the organization unclear as to what its annual performance has been. Most police departments still use traditional measures to evaluate their effectiveness. These measures are: (1) Reported crime rates; (2) Overall arrests; (3) Clearance rates; (4) Response times (Alpert and Moore, 1993, p. 1). With the transition to community policing, 'these measures reflect an increasingly outmoded model of police tasks and fail to capture many important contributions that police make to the quality of life' (Alpert and Moore, 1993, p. 2). Therefore, the measures of police effectiveness have to change to reflect the changing role of the police. In addition, other models of policing which stress a conservative 'zero tolerance' mandate, a strategic and technologically oriented 'problem oriented/intelligence led' mandate and a liberal 'crime prevention through social development' mandate are inherent in the changing role of policing a democratic society. This pluralism of ideas and lack of real focus on the outcome expected of the police create the problem that is being explored in this project.'--PhDTree website.