(Re)Allocation of Police Capacity in Multiple Stages of Efficiency

Crime puts sustained pressure on public security budgets in Latin America, yet police resources are often distributed with little reference to the production capacity of the units that receive them. This study addresses the problem of reallocating police personnel and vehicles across the 26 Integrated Security Areas (AIS) of the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, so that resources released by units operating below capacity are absorbed by units already operating at full capacity in the most vulnerable areas. The study proposes an operational framework that integrates data envelopment analysis and multicriteria decision analysis in multiple stages of efficiency to measure the production capacity of military police (ostensive efficiency) and civil police (investigative efficiency) units based on slacks and the potential for improvement of police resources. In the first stage, an input-oriented, non-convex free disposal hull model measures the technical efficiency of the police units in each AIS, using monthly records of officers, patrol vehicles, arrests, firearms seizures, and clearances of violent crimes. In the second stage, the PROMETHEE II (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment of Evaluations) outranking method ranks the security areas according to their vulnerability to violent crimes and property crimes, using rank order centroid weights, to prioritize the destination of the resource slacks identified in the first stage. A third, iterative stage then reallocates personnel and vehicles from the least vulnerable areas with idle resources to the most vulnerable efficient areas until all units operate at full capacity. The procedure absorbs roughly 60% of idle patrol vehicles, 85% of idle military police officers, and over 87% of idle civil police officers. The framework provides policymakers and security managers with a systematic approach for evaluating, comparing, and ranking policing alternatives, and for reallocating public resources for crime prevention in complex decision-making scenarios.