Historically, police researchers have struggled to validly measure patrol officer productivity and correlate productivity metrics to meaningful community outcomes, such as crime and disorder. This article discusses traditional productivity metrics, recurrent threats to the validity of these measures, and innovative methods for more accurately capturing patrol productivity. It also explains the IMPACTT (Identified, Measured, Productive, Array, Correlated, Tracked, and Tested) guidelines designed by the author for communities, law enforcement agencies, and police researchers concerning the creation and evaluation of productivity metrics. This article will be published with a collection of other entries written by participants of the National Institute of Justice’s Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS) Scholars program. Each of the LEADS scholars represented in the digest have identified a problem relevant to their departments and examined the issue from an evidence-based perspective.
