An exploratory analysis for performance assessment of state police forces in india: an eclectic approach

Police organizations play an extremely important role in the system of law enforcement for all countries. The chief responsibility of police is the control and prevention of criminal activities, which in turn can be used as one of the key indicators for adjudging police performance, apart from a variety of other parameters related to population, mobility and budget. Today, performance evaluation of Indian police and a detailed analysis of the state-wise police performance can be deemed as absolutely necessary, in light of the recent increase of reported crimes in various states of this densely populous nation. Thus, the objective of this paper is to rank and compare the police performance of the Indian states, and identify those states where immediate attention and major overhaul is required. A limited amount of research has been carried out in this area, mainly employing the data envelopment analysis approach. A definitive ranking of the police performance of the Indian states has never been derived using any of the multi-criteria decision making techniques, which represents a huge gap in research. The derived results, obtained via implementation of the preference ranking organization method for enrichment of evaluation—geometrical analysis for interactive aid tool, indicate that Kerala is the best performer amongst all the 28 alternative states, while Punjab ranks as the worst performing state. Finally, in order to determine the influence of individual criterion on the overall state rank and in order to obtain a visual representation of the rankings on a political map of India, a novel geographic information system method utilizing the hue–saturation–value color coding scheme is applied in this work.