Relationship between police efficiency and crime rate: a worldwide approach

Abstract

This work aims to study the relationship between crime rate and police efficiency in a number of countries worldwide in the 1998–2006 period, controlling for other variables such as probability of being arrested, probability of being con- victed, population density, literacy rate, GDP per capita, unemployment rate and foreign direct investment. On average, police efficiency for the period studied is 84 %. The mean efficiency ratio ranges from 0.82 to 0.87. The upper limit corre- sponds to 2004, and the lower limit is found in the years 1998, 2000 and 2002. The results obtained show the inverse relationship between police efficiency and the crime rate while a direct relationship is obtained for the variable literacy. Similar findings were obtained in our robustness analysis, in which police efficiency neg- atively affects other measures of delinquency levels, such as the UN victimization survey variable.