Measurement of Iranian s rural traffic police relative efficiency

background; To reduce road traffic accidents (RTAs), the governments invests various resources. Major of interventions implements by traffic police. Therefore, assessment the efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency of police is necessary. In this study aimed to measure Iran s traffic police efficiency in reducing RTAs of 198 police stations from 24 provinces of 31 provinces since March 20, 2013 to March 20, 2014.Methods; In this study, efficiency score of rural police stations were measured with using seven input variables named the number of; police (percentage), patrol cars, police motorcycles, patrol teams, law penalty and punishments, speed cameras and score of cultural and educational activities and three output variables as the number of accidents, injuries and deaths applying three-stage DEA model. After measuring crude efficiency score in stage one to exclude the effect of environmental and random errors Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model was applied and respect to environmental and random error conditions, all of police stations adjusted with similar status. In stage three, the adjusted outputs were imputed in model and efficiency score was measured, again. The applied method as a non-parametric method without any prerequisite statistical assumption and using different inputs and outputs with specific coefficient for everyvariable measures the efficiency score. The acquired score ranged 0-1 which 0 means perfect inefficiency and 1 means perfect efficiency of studied unit. Results; The annual means of damage, injury and fatal accidents of rural police stations were 247.7 ± 258.4, 184.9 ± 176.9 and 28.7 ± 19.5, as the output variables. The averages of input variables included; 5.9 ± 3.0 patrol teams, 0.5% ± 0.2 manpower proportions, 7.5 ± 2.9 patrol cars, 0.5 ± 1.3 motorcycles, 77,279.1 ± 46,794.7 penalties, 90.9 ± 2.8 cultural and educational activity score, 0.7 ± 2.4 speed cameras. The adjusted environmental variables were the length of different road types, literacy rate, population of young people, number of household owning motorcycle and cars. After excluding the effect of environmental variables on efficiency score the pure efficiency score showed Ardebil province with mean of 1 had the most efficient police stations and East Azarbaijan had the least ones.Conclusion; Respect to limited resources in low and middle income countries and requirement of effective resource management, the DEA model whilst considering methodological and subject issues could apply to measure and monitor relative efficiency of traffic police.

کلیدواژه ها:

Traffic police ، Efficiency ، Data Envelopment Analysis