Abstract
Background: As rapid response has been a key policing strategy for police departments around the globe, so has police response time been a key performance indicator. This scoping review maps and assesses the variables that predict police response time. Methods: This review considers empirical studies, written in english, that include quantitative data from which an association between the outcome variable police response time and any predictor can be observed or derived. This review provides both a narrative synthesis as well as what we termed a hybrid synthesis, a novel way of synthesizing a large quantitative dataset which is considered too rich for a mere narrative synthesis and yet does not allow for meta-analysis. Results: The search, screening and selection process yielded 39 studies, which presented 630 associations between 122 unique predictor variables and police response time. In order to present the results in a digestible way, we classified these into categories and subcategories. All methodological steps and the findings are made public: https://github.com/timverlaan/prt . Conclusions: Most of the conclusion and discussion focuses on lessons learned and recommendations for future research, as it proved hard to draw any definitive conclusions on causal factors related to police response time. We recommend that future studies clearly describe mechanisms, focus on the components of police response time (reporting time, dispatch time, travel time—or a combination of these), attempt to standardize predictors and outcome variables, and we call for more research into reporting time. We conclude this review with a first attempt at deriving a causal model of police response time from the subcategories of predictor variables we observed in the empirical studies included in this review. Trail Registration: https://osf.io/hu2e9 .
Original language | English |
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Article number | 19 |
Journal | Crime Science |
Volume | 12 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023, The Author(s).
Funding
This research was carried out within the What Works in Policing research programme of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and funded by the Netherlands Police. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Funders | Funder number |
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NSCR | |
Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement | |
The National Police of the Netherlands |
Keywords
- Causal model
- Police response time
- Predictors
- Scoping review