The Antechamber of the Reform Debate

Critical Examination of Hungarian Police Performance Measurement, Statistical Self-Justification and Institutional Self-Knowledge as Prerequisites for Structural Reform

Abstract

Introduction: The Hungarian police reform debate has generated substantial scholarship over three decades. Leading researchers – Géza Finszter, Ferenc Krémer, István Szikinger, László Korinek, Klára Kerezsi and László Christián – have each mapped its normative, constitutional, criminological and sociological dimensions. Yet one prior question has remained consistently unaddressed: whether the police performance measurement system produces a valid account of the organisation's own functioning at all.

Objectives: The paper aims to demonstrate that statistical self-justification, the institutional closure of the effectiveness concept, and the organisational restriction of independent research collectively block the preconditions for genuine reform.

Methods: The study combines critical document analysis with a systematic review of the Hungarian policing literature and the author's own empirical data: an attitude survey. A five-pole matrix is used to classify and compare reform debate authors by disciplinary orientation.

Results: The study identifies three structural distortion mechanisms: (1) the systematic distortion of detection statistics through the operation of the case selection mechanism; (2) the institutional marginalization of the subjective dimension of public safety from the measurement system; (3) the organizational limitation of independent law enforcement research. The views of the authors of the reform debate can be placed in a five-pole matrix, the missing pre-question of which is precisely the credibility of the statistical self-image. The career of the Good State – Good Police program has shown how the organizational immune reaction neutralizes reform proposals if the measurement system itself does not change.

Conclusion: Dismantling statistical self-justification is a constitutional, not merely methodological, task: democratic accountability requires an externally verifiable picture of police performance. The institutional freedom of independent policing research is therefore a reform prerequisite, not an optional extra. Future work should focus on integrating alternative indicators – trust indices, subjective security perceptions, victim satisfaction – into a validated mixed-methods measurement framework.