Police Leadership and Administration

A 21st-Century Strategic Approach

William F. Walsh, Gennaro F. Vito

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351244411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

William Walsh and Gennaro Vito have adapted the strategic management process to the police organizational world in this innovative new text, Police Leadership and Administration: A 21st-Century Approach. Focusing principally on the police executive, this book covers pioneering management techniques for leaders facing the challenges of today's complex environment, providing the police practitioner instruction in planning, setting direction, developing strategy, assessing internal and external environments, creating learning organizations, and managing and evaluating the change process. It also tackles how to handle the political, economic, social, and technical considerations that differ from one community to the next.

Police Leadership and Administration trains individuals to search for solutions, rather than relying on old formulas and scientific management principles. It shows how to tailor responses to the unique problems and issues that professionals are likely to face in the field of law enforcement, providing a foundation with which to adapt to an ever-changing criminal justice climate. This book is essential for forward-thinking police leadership courses in colleges and professional training programs.

1 The Evolution of Police Leadership and Administration

Police administration is not applied mechanics, but a living-breathing organism shaped by the political, social, and economic trends of time and place.

Thomas Repetto, The Blue Parade (Repetto, 1978, p. 4)

Learning Objectives

1.	To describe the evolution of policing.
2.	To identify the police functions.
3.	To describe the types of police departments in the United States.
4.	To define the administrative challenge of today’s policing environment.
5.	To identify the relationship between the learning organization and strategic policing.
6.	To understand the impact of Peel’s London police model on professional policing.
7.	To describe the relevance of Peel’s Principles of Law Enforcement.
8.	To define the different paradigmatic shifts in 20th-century American policing.
9.	To identify the characteristics of the Community Problem-solving Paradigm.
10.	To be able to list the characteristics of the top suburban police departments.
11.	To describe the difference between an open and closed management system.
12.	To identify the characteristics of strategic policing.
13.	To define the Compstat management system.
14.	To describe Intelligence-Led Policing.

Introduction

The “Police” are an organized body of individuals that represent the civil authority of a government. The origin of the word “police” can be traced to the Greek word politea, which refers to the internal administration and government of the city (Fyfe, Greene, Walsh, Wilson, & McLaren, 1997, p. 4). Since the emergence of professional policing in the 1830s, the word has come to define the personnel and organizations whose principal concern is the maintenance of order and the enforcement of law. Members of the police profession may be referred to as police officers, troopers, sheriffs, constables, agents, rangers, and peace officers. Police departments are products by their political, historical, and community environments. In the United States policing has evolved into a local governmental function responsible for public order and safety within a defined political jurisdictional area such as a city, town, county, and borough or state. The police in the many municipalities are the only public service who will respond when called 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. As a result, police officers are the most visible representatives of local governmental authority. As such, their enforcement activities determine the limits of public safety, the level of governmental service, and individual freedom. Since American police departments are primarily local institutions, they are influenced by and responsive to pressure and politics of the community within which they serve.

Our nation has developed from an agrarian-based group of former English colonies into a complex technological society that is interconnected to the entire world. The strains and pressures created by this transformation have brought about economic and social changes that affect all aspects of our society including public safety. The effective use of police resources is essential to the maintenance of community safety and security. However, the events of 9/11 and the resulting national emphasis on homeland security have accelerated the need for police departments to understand and effectively respond to the shifting demands and uncertainty of these times. Changing economic systems, multiculturalism, demographics, community confidence, family structures, limited resources, technology, and transnational crime are increasingly placing greater demands on police services. As these demands have expanded, public expectations of what the police should be doing and how they should do it have also changed. Today’s police organizations are expected to take responsibility for traditional order-maintenance functions as well as many new ones, requiring different skills and ways of working (Flanagan, 2008).

United States Policing System

The United States has one of the more decentralized and complex policing systems in the world. This system is an outgrowth of the nation’s founders’ fear of a strong centralized government. This fear led them to emphasize local autonomy over centralized authority while delegating policing powers to state and local governments. A Bureau of Justice Statistics survey conducted in 2008 found there are nearly 800,000 full-time sworn law enforcement officers, serving in 17,876 law enforcement agencies that provide protective services to 312 million people in the United States. These departments consist of:

• 12,766 General-purpose Local (municipal) Police Departments.
• 3,067 Sheriff’s Offices.
• 49 State Police Departments.
• 731,903 sworn employees and a combined annual budget of about $3 billion.
• 1,481 Special police agencies for highways, port, transit, causeway, housing, school, and/or capitol police.

American police organizations may also be described beyond these raw numbers as:

• Urban—multilevel departments: These are large bureaucratic hierarchical organizations with a high degree of task specialization. They are usually staffed with over a thousand sworn and non-sworn employees. Their service areas are characterized by diverse socio-economic urban communities consisting of high-density zones of crime and human service demand.
• Suburban departments: These are medium-sized organizations of less than a thousand sworn employees. They usually have a strong resource base with limited task specialization. Suburban police departments are presently experiencing an increase in service demand. Most departments with 100 or more officers had full-time specialized units to address child abuse, juvenile crime, gangs, and domestic violence (Reaves, 2015).
• County police/full service sheriff’s office: These organizations have a variety of organizational structures, service demand and development. Structural change is occurring in which smaller municipal police departments are being merged with the countywide agencies or contracting with them to provide police services.
• Small community: These departments have a small number of personnel, usually less than 25 officers, lack resources but have a close relationship with the communities they serve. Their operational officers are expected to perform all police tasks. About half (48%) of police departments in the United States employed fewer than 10 officers (Reaves, 2015).
• State and highway—state-wide jurisdiction: These are large bureaucratic organizations that either perform full service policing state-wide or are restricted to the enforcement of highway safety regulations and laws. They are noted for their traditional military-style culture and high levels of integrity. In states where they have full state-wide police powers they support local police in serious or complicated cases and help to coordinate multijurisdictional task force activity. There are 49 State Police Departments in the United States. The state of Hawaii is the one exception.
• Special function: These are organizations whose authority is limited to the enforcement of special laws, control areas, and specific functions. Campus and Fish, Game and Wildlife police organizations are typical examples of these types of agencies.

Our policing system is responsible for three distinct functions: crime control, order maintenance, and service provision (Glensor, Correia, & Peak, 2000). Noted police scholar Herman Goldstein (1977, p. 23) identified the complex multiple objectives of policing as follows:

1. To prevent and control conduct widely recognized as threatening to life and property (serious crime).
2. To aid individuals who are in danger of physical harm, such as the victim of a criminal attack.
3. To protect the constitutional guarantees, such as the right of free speech and assembly.
4. To facilitate the movement of people and vehicles.
5. To assist those who cannot care for themselves: the intoxicated, the addicted, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the old, and the young.
6. To resolve conflict, whether it be between individuals, groups of individuals, or individuals and their government.
7. To identify problems that have the potential for becoming more serious problems for the individual citizen, for the police, or for the government.
8. To create and maintain a feeling of security in the community.

On a daily basis police departments seek to fulfill these objectives by responding to emergency calls for service, preventing crime, enforcing laws and ordinances, rendering first aid, resolving disputes, regulating traffic, investigating crimes, and arresting violators. However, the way police departments administer and deliver their principal programs and services have evolved over the last two centuries.

Administrative Challenge

As one might imagine, administering a police organization today is a challenging task. The modern police agency is expected to take responsibility for traditional order-maintenance functions as well as many new ones, which require different skills and ways of working. The complex nature of today’s policing and the economic climate in which police organizations operate has fundamentally changed the leadership expectations of police executives (Flanagan, 2008). Every day police leaders face issues of complexity, uncertainty, and sensitivity that require a different level of thinking and decision making. Police executives are challenged to create effective organizations that are adaptable and proactively responsive to changing public safety needs and community relationships. Conventional ways of thinking, analyzing data, solving problems, making decisions, and responding to organizational demands are changing. Few situations are easily resolved with methods developed to address issues in the past. Today’s challenges require thinking at different analytical and strategic levels.

William Geller (1997) assessed this challenging administrative environment by asking, “Can our police and sheriff departments find ways to work smarter, not just harder?” He answered by suggesting that police departments should become “learning organizations” just as many of our nation’s most successful business organizations have. Geller believes that this development will allow police departments to innovate and create new strategies to provide public safety. In this manner he believes that they will serve their communities more effectively, efficiently, and legitimately. A learning organization is one that enhances its effectiveness by adapting to the needs of its environment (Senge, 1990). It actively engages, evaluates, and adapts by continually assessing its environmental demands and operational methods. It learns from its own and the similar experiences of other organizations in order to adjust and respond to the environmental demands it faces.

Managers in learning organizations actively seek to expand their capacity to understand the environmental pressures they are facing by consistently gathering and analyzing information. The knowledge gained from this process forms the basis for the creation of data-driven strategies and tactics that are designed to respond to changing operational demands. In learning organizations, information collection is a constant process, along with ongoing verification and analysis. In order for police organizations to become learning organizations they must develop the ability to restructure their operational tactics to meet both current and changing needs of their communities (Silverman, 1999). In these departments the development of operational tactics and strategies is an information data-driven analytical process. Operational success and sustainability are maintained through an ongoing process of information gathering, analysis and sharing, strategy and tactical development, implementation, and continuous assessment.

Managerial decisions in learning organizations are influenced by a diverse set of factors that are derived from without and within these organizations. Externally, these factors include but are not limited to changes in government, community demographics, cultural values, economic conditions, both local and transnational crime, global terrorism, and the degree of community confidence in the police organization and its officers. Internally, clarity of an organization’s mission and goals, recruitment and retention of personnel, organizational values, internal politics, accountability, training, unions, and managerial ability affect police organizational performance. These forces place increased pressure on how police executives and administrators plan and decide their organization’s response to community’s needs.

This challenge has led to the selection of strategic management as the unifying theme of this book. Strategic management is the art and science of formulating and implementing strategies to accomplish organizational goals and objectives (David, 2009). The primary purpose of strategic management is to achieve an organization’s mission by matching its strengths and capabilities with the demands placed upon it by its environment (Dessler, 2004). Strategic management is the process by which learning organizations are created. It is currently being practiced in police departments whose executives are developing management systems that are operating under a variety of mega-strategies such as Compstat, Intelligence-Led Policing, Predictive Policing, and Evidence-Based Policing. Strategic management and the variety of ways in which it has been adapted in policing is the primary focus of this book.

In policing, strategic management involves the development of innovative strategies whose characteristics involve information analysis and technology, strategy and tactics development, managerial accountability, creativity, and continuous assessment to control crime and provide public safety. Strategic management requires that a police department’s chief executive and his or her administrative team create a “strategic vision” for the department that consists of clear measurable goals that are focused on integrating organizational elements such as information gathering, computer information systems, patrol, specialized units, and staff support systems to respond to the public safety needs of the community. On the unit level, strategic management refers to the managerial integration of information, strategy, tactics, personnel, and evaluation to achieve organizational goals and objectives. This is a proactive instead of a reactive approach to organizational leadership that is appropriate for responding to ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The Evolution of Police Leadership and Administration
• Chapter 2 Administration, Authority, and Command
• Chapter 3 Police Leadership
• Chapter 4 Setting Strategic Direction
• Chapter 5 Managing Change and Culture
• Chapter 6 Strategic Analysis
• Chapter 7 Strategic Planning
• Chapter 8 Strategic Operations
• Chapter 9 Human Resource Management
• Chapter 10 Measuring Police Performance
• Chapter 11 Maintaining Integrity and Professional Standards
• Chapter 12 Creating Safe Communities
• Chapter 13 Future Challenges and Concerns
• Index