Ostrom

One of the first projects Ostrom undertook at Indiana University was an examination of an urban resource arguably as valuable as water: the police. At the time, a prevailing presumption for urban services like policing was that they underwent economies of scale and that a large centralized department would be most efficient for a city. Her project began modestly enough, with a performance comparison of one large and three small police departments that differed in size but served comparable middle-class neighborhoods in Indianapolis. Similar projects then followed for neighborhoods in Chicago and St. Louis, which eventually paved the way for a large-scale comparison of 80 metropolitan areas. The end results of this 15-year collaborative effort revealed several important conceptual processes of urban policing and turned widely held presumptions on their head.
“The presumption that economies of scale were prevalent was wrong; the presumption that you needed a single police department was wrong; and the presumption that individual departments wouldn't be smart enough to work out ways of coordinating is wrong,” Ostrom says. Most aspects of police work in fact experienced diseconomies of scale. “For patrolling, if you don't know the neighborhood, you can't spot the early signs of problems, and if you have five or six layers of supervision, the police chief doesn't know what's occurring on the street,” she explains. On the other hand, other areas such as dispatching and crime laboratories showed positive economies of scale, and technological advancements have helped those areas to improve.
On the whole, polycentric arrangements with small, medium, and large departmental systems generally outperformed cities that had only one or two large departments. Considering that there were discussions to reduce the number of police districts from 40,000 to approximately 400 at the time, with no data to support it, Ostrom's research came at an opportune time. “I'm not thrilled with everything going on in modern policing,” she says, “but I do think in this regard we made a big difference.”
Via Pubmed
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