Risk assessment and risk management in policing

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critique contemporary tools for assessing and managing the risk of police misconduct and suggest directions for their improvement. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on extant literature, synthesizing several lines of inquiry to summarize what the authors know about patterns of police misconduct, and what the authors know about assessing and managing police misconduct. Then the paper draws from the literature on offender risk assessment in criminal justice to draw lessons for assessing and managing the risk of police misconduct. Findings – The authors found that there is good reason to believe that the tools used to assess the risk of misconduct make suboptimal predictions about officer performance because they rely on limited information of dubious value, but also that the predictive models on which the tools are based could be improved by better emulating procedures for assessing offenders’ risk of recidivism. Research limitations/implications – Future research should examine cross-sectional and longitudinal patterns of misconduct and associations between risk-related outputs and enforcement activity, develop better measures of criterion variables, and evaluate the predictive accuracy of risk assessment tools. Practical implications – Police managers should make better use of the information available to them, improve the quantity and quality of information if feasible, and cooperate in the necessary research. Originality/value – This paper offers a new synthesis of extant research to demonstrate the limitations of contemporary provisions for assessing the risk of police misconduct, and potential avenues for useful research and improved practice.