Officials pay attention to how their agencies are ranked. Think of the influence of the U.S. News college rankings. Bearfield, Maranto and Wolf ranked cities by an index that includes both homicides and police-related civilian deaths. But my new paper shows that how high a city ranks depends on the mathematical function used to combine the individual variables into a single score. Functions that are equally plausible can make the rankings more or less sensitive to police-related civilian deaths.
The publisher allows me to give away some free downloads, so you can get the paper at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HGTQKSQXDRZR5IAUMGWW/full?target=10.1080/10999922.2021.1886439
David S. Reed (2021) Police Performance Rankings Depend on the Functional Form of the Index: A Comment on Bearfield, Maranto, and Wolf, Public Integrity, DOI: 10.1080/10999922.2021.1886439
Center for Public Administrators 