Title: A PROMETHEE based uncertainty analysis of UK police force performance rank improvement

Authors: Malcolm J. Beynon, Harry Barton

Addresses: Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU, UK. ' Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham, NG1 4BU, UK

Abstract: PROMETHEE is a popular multi-criteria decision making ranking technique that is regularly applied to enable the performance comparisons of alternatives across relevant criteria. The police forces in the UK, as with other public services, are periodically compared with each other on their performance. This study demonstrates the employment of PROMETHEE as an analysis technique in the investigation of the performance rank improvement of individual UK police forces (with their |most similar forces| groups), including minimum changes necessary to a number of performance criteria (sanction detection levels) that will manifest the intended rank improvement. The graphical representations presented offer an insight into the implications of such a PROMETHEE based series of perceived improvement analyses. The goals of this study are twofold: firstly, to exposit PROMETHEE based uncertainty analysis in rank improvement and secondly, how the results can form part of the evidence to aid in police forces| performance strategies.

Keywords: multi-criteria decision making; MCDM; UK police forces; United Kingdom; police performance; ranking; PROMETHEE; uncertainty analysis; performance comparisons; performance strategies.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSS.2008.021918

International Journal of Society Systems Science, 2008 Vol.1 No.2, pp.176 - 193

Published online: 09 Dec 2008 *

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