Will Rogers Is Jenksing Police Response Times
Simon Demers · Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice/La Revue canadienne de criminologie et de justice pénale · 2017
Because police jurisdictions typically rely on different call classification schemes and handle a different mix of calls, it is difficult to compare multi-priority police response time distributions between two or more jurisdictions. For the same reasons, it can be challenging to compare response time trends over time, even within a given police jurisdiction. Hypothetical examples illustrate the main analytical challenges. Then, a simple clustering approach, the Jenks natural breaks method, is demonstrated. This approach can be used to objectively compare police response time distributions. The resulting comparisons remain unaffected by differences or changes in call classification rules and cannot be easily manipulated or skewed, either intentionally or inadvertently. Although the discussion is framed within a police context, the proposed analytical approach has the potential to be useful for other emergency services and benchmarking settings.