Three standards are feasible from a societal point of view: equality of output, equality of input, and the maximization of product by adherence to marginal efficiency conditions. This model was developed to estimate a production function for a single jurisdiction, New York City. It assumed that only one type of crime was relevant to distribution of police services and that was robbery, largely the common street mugging. Inputs were treated as manpower alone, and parameters were incidence of crime per head and clearance rate, each determined by several variables. Data were gathered from police department tapes, census tapes, and a regional plan association computerized survey. Simulations showed that an increase in manpower will lead to a fall in crime for that precinct, but that high police presence in adjacent areas will tend to increase crime in the precinct. Pursuit of an equal workload objective can lead to minimization of the citywide incidence of crime. Allocating manpower based on equality of risk would lead to a rise in total robberies of 24 percent, most of which would occur in relatively law-abiding middle class districts as police are drafted to cut crime in more crime prone areas. A policy of allocating police manpower on an equal per capita basis would produce a doubling of the robbery total, with the greatest impact occurring in less stable areas. Tables, formulas, 6 footnotes, and 23 references are included.