Economics of the Police: Recruitment, Retention and Finance

该项目将重点关注警务的三个广泛领域：(i)它将使用创新的数据集衡量新招募的警察的质量，并检查这种质量如何受到当地劳动力市场条件的影响，例如当地替代职业的工资。这一匿名数据集提供了与个人特征相匹配的合格/不合格分数和测试分数，用于对潜在警察服务新兵进行强制性国家评估期间使用的各种评估程序。这个数据集是由NPIA提供给我们的——现在是国家警务学院。该项目将此数据集与进一步的当地警务区特征相匹配。这项研究将直接影响与公共薪酬有关的几个问题-薪酬与公共服务质量之间的权衡；如果有的话，在公共部门扩大地方薪酬差异的理由；等等......。（ii）会研究影响警务人员留任率的因素。主要的焦点将是退休后的退出（因为警察在40多岁之前的退出率很低）；健康状况不佳的管理（提前退休）；以及退休警察的职业选择。这将直接关系到正在进行的警官养恤金和退休规定的改革，更一般地说，关系到老年工人的部署和“第二职业选择”。（iii）评估本地在警务人员开支及警务人员部署方面的裁量权范围。警察服务的资金来自中央资金和地方税收（“戒律”）的混合，这些税收是通过征收市政税筹集的。警察经费的份额在各个警察当局之间差别很大。这反映了两大类因素：各议会税收管辖区的应税能力差异，以及各地方对警察服务需求的差异，这取决于中央拨款的分配。该研究将利用从CIPFA提供的公布数据和账户中得出的各种应税能力和需求的代理措施，试图了解这些因素的相对重要性。鉴于最近警察和犯罪专员的选举，以及对警察预算决策权力下放的日益强调，这一主题将引起国家和地方各级学者和政策制定者的兴趣。

The project will focus on three broad areas of policing: (i) it will measure the quality of police officer recruits using an innovative data set, and examine how this quality is affected by local labour market conditions, such as wages in alternative occupations in the local area. This anonymised data set provides pass/fail marks and test scores for a variety of assessment procedures used during the compulsory national assessment of would-be recruits to the police service, matched to individual characteristics. This data set has been provided to us by NPIA - now the national College of Policing. The project will match this data set to further local police area characteristics. This research will directly impact on several questions relating to public pay - the trade-off between pay and quality of public service; the case, if any, for greater local pay variation in the public sector; and so on. (ii) it will examine the factors that affect the retention rates of police officers. The primary focus will be on exits into retirement (since exit rates of police officers are low until their late-forties); on the management of ill-health (early retirement); and of what career choices are made by retired police officers. This will be of direct relevance to the ongoing reform of the pension and retirement provisions for police officers, and, more generally, to the deployment and 'second career choices' of older workers. (iii) it will assess the scope for local discretion over spending on police officers and the deployment of police officers. The police service is financed by a mixture of central funding and local tax ('the precept') raised via the levy of council tax. The share of police funding varies widely across police authorities. This reflects two broad groups of factors: differences in taxable capacity across council tax jurisdictions and, conditional on central grant allocations, differences in the demand for police services across local area. The research will seek to understand the relative importance of these factors using a variety of proxy measures of taxable capacity and demand derived from published data and accounts provided by CIPFA. Given the recent election of Police and Crime Commissioners, and an increasing emphasis on decentralisation of decision-making on police budgets, this topic will be of interest to both academics and policy-makers at the national and local level.