Open Collections

The development and use of social accounts as a means of evaluating the effectiveness of community services : a case study of the Vancouver Police Department

University of British Columbia

The scope for physical planning and development in many older, more established cities in North America is rapidly declining. In these cities, the role of the planner is shifting to meet a new challenge, the improvement of the quality of life. One of the principal methods of improving the quality of life in cities has been the provision of community services. This is resulting in a new role for the planner, that of monitoring and evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of community services. The police service was taken as a vehicle for developing a method of evaluation for any community service in any city. The thesis identifies major police functions and assigns them to the police programs they are capable of supporting. A set of performance accounts is developed for each program consisting of input, output and impact accounts. The Input Account describes the resources allocated to each police program. The Output Account describes the productivity of these resources in carrying out the police functions. And, the Impact Account describes the effectiveness of these functions in bringing about the desired improvement in the quality of life. Moreover, the quantitative and qualitative indicators of input, output and impact contained in the accounts are related to five central questions of program evaluation. Furthermore, the indicators of input, output and impact contained in the accounts are the data from which a mathematical model of the police organization, the community and the interrelationship between them can be constructed. This model will have the predictive power of anticipating the outcome of proposed allocative decisions in advance of their actual implementation. Thus, the thesis develops a method not only for evaluating the past performance of previous allocative decisions but the anticipated performance of proposed allocative decisions as well.

Text

2010-02-01

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/19478

Planning

University of British Columbia

Graduate