Elisa Facchetti (University of Rome Tor Vergata); Arianna Ornaghi (Hertie School); Eddy Zou (LSE)
Abstract
Can managers improve police performance? We study this question in the London Metropolitan Police Service, focusing on Borough Commanders, middle managers who lead territorial divisions. We build a panel of Borough Commander careers from 2005 to 2019 and link manager assignments to division-by-month outcomes from police records, investigation outcomes, and workforce data. Exploiting manager mobility across divisions in an AKM-style framework, we estimate that middle managers account for about one quarter of the variance in log clearances per worker. Higher-performing managers raise clearances across offense types, increase both police-issued sanctions and court convictions, and expand proactive enforcement, as measured by drug detections, while relying on fewer back-office staff. Managerial quality also shapes how divisions absorb external policy shocks: above-median commanders mitigate the increase in violent crime following police station closures and turn the adoption of body-worn cameras into faster response times, while less well-managed divisions experience slower responses after adoption.