Policing—always a high-profile local government service—has seen more than its share of news coverage in the last few years. Confrontations between police and residents have spurred a renewed focus on police-community relations and an examination of police practices nationwide.

To assess police performance, it’s tempting to zero in on arrest statistics and other traditional measures related directly to enforcement—incidents, citations, arrests, clearances. But in an article for Governing.com, ICMA’s Director of Performance Initiatives Randall Reid explains how police and community leaders can view police performance within the larger public-safety picture.

In “High-Performance Policing: Getting the Metrics Right,” Reid explains how using the right analytics can help local government leaders recognize factors outside policing that erode the social fabric of the community and alienate residents in geographic areas where police employ the most vigorous crime deterrence strategies.

Says Reid, “Any effort to manage with data should focus not on a single performance measure but on a suite of measures. Through next-generation analytics tools, jurisdictions can consider the prevalence of crimes as one indicator of how their jurisdictions are performing while comparing their performance to other jurisdictions, either by population size or by more customized criteria.”