Reassurance Policing, Community Policing and Measuring Police Performance

The central theme of this article is that current police performance measures are largely inadequate for capturing many dimensions of community policing practice. Focusing upon a recent innovation in policing strategy in the United Kingdom, that of reassurance policing, an argument is developed for alternative ways of thinking about police performance and how it can be gauged. Drawing upon ideas and insights from social research methodology, it is proposed that a more qualitative approach to police performance offers the potential for the development of more meaningful forms of evaluation. Keywords: Reassurance PolicingCommunity PolicingPerformance measurement Notes 1. The KIN acronym was suggested by Chief Superintendent Carl Crathern. The term "informant" has an established meaning in research methodology, and a different but equally established one in policing. Recently, the British police have become concerned by the pejorative connotations of the label and have re-labelled informants as "covert human intelligence sources". This article employs the informant term in its social scientific usage.