Measurement and validity study on police effectiveness

The purpose of this study is to identify and validate how police effectiveness, one of the key variables in procedural justice theory, is measured. Police effectiveness is an instrumental measure of whether the police are successful in deterring and solving crime, and some research suggests that the more positively citizens perceive police effectiveness, the more willing they are to cooperate with the police. However, unlike procedural fairness and police legitimacy, the effect of police effectiveness on the dependent variable, police cooperation, is not consistent. For this purpose, we reviewed domestic and foreign studies centered on the police effectiveness variable, and revised and modified the items used in Sunshine & Tyler(2003)'s study to verify their validity. The results of a survey of 539 adult men and women living in Seoul with Korean nationality from October to November 2022 were used in the study, and validity was verified through reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis. The results of the analysis showed that the eight items used in the study are appropriate tools for measuring police effectiveness. This study is significant in that it validated the validity of a police effectiveness measurement tool, presented a unified standardized questionnaire in Korea, and explored the possibility of its utilization. On the other hand, since the performance of police activities as perceived by citizens is likely to differ by the field of police activities, this study suggests that it is necessary to prepare detailed criteria to appropriately measure it, as well as to conduct future studies such as repeated validation and further development of items with high validity and reliability.