Community oriented local police care: No autonomy without accountability

Without transparency towards citizens and/or benchmarking of the performance of the police districts, there is more room than desirable for abuse of trust and inefficiency. Notwithstanding the given benefit of the doubt by controlling for heterogeneity in the vicinity and policy weights, some police districts perform very poorly on provided service. In order to identify and remedy these districts on a regular basis, there is a need for transparency and full democratic accountability.

Figures show that 25 percent of examined local police districts can improve citizen satisfaction by more than 10 percent and the 10 percent worst performing districts can improve satisfaction by about 20 percent.

In spite of protest from local police districts, no global inquiry of citizen satisfaction has been organized since 2009. This trend towards less information and transparency clearly goes against the current mindset. This study and others abroad show that obtaining higher transparency towards citizens concerning the functioning of the police and performance through benchmarking are indeed possible and desirable. It is crucial that the Standing Police Monitoring Committee (Committee P) widens it scope from barely transparent handling of complaints and case studies towards transparent benchmarking of local police districts concerning offered services. This way, not only the Committee P, but also the citizen can judge the success of zonal police policy.