Tracking Quality of Police Actions in a Victim Contact Program: A Case Study of Training, Tracking, and Feedback (TTF) in Evidence-Based Policing

Abstract

In policing, quality of implementation—not just whether a policy is implemented, but how it is implemented—often means the difference between achieving the desired outcomes or not. Police leaders can respond to tracking evidence that shows poor quality of implementation by either improving officer compliance with policy, improving the policy itself, or both. We report a case study of the tracking of implementation quality in a randomized controlled trial of a police policy for contacting victims, in which the first author was a participant-observer. We show that when the results of tracking were fed back to officers to improve compliance, and to managers, who then redesigned policy and training in repeated iterations, the quality of implementation and victim satisfaction improved substantially. This evidence-based, training-tracking-feedback strategy of implementation can be applied more generally to improve the quality of police services and outcomes.