Police in America. Steven G. Brandl
sector where profit is a shared goal (especially if profits are distributed among employees), officers who work the streets and supervisors who manage the street cops do not necessarily have the same goals or priorities.8 Police officers are most interested in completing their work with minimal interference. Their alliances and loyalties are most often to fellow officers. Managers, however, are most interested in achieving results that are in line with agency objectives. Police officers seek to maximize their autonomy; managers seek to limit that autonomy. Street cops are concerned with doing the work; management cops are concerned with how this work is represented. While there is sometimes conflict between street cops and management cops,9 there is also mutual dependence.10 Street officers can make work difficult for their supervisors and vice versa. For example, managers may be able to control promotions and shift assignments or other work rewards or sanctions. On the other hand, if dissatisfied with management decisions, workers can engage in work stoppages or speed-ups. Although such tactics are seldom used by officers, it illustrates the power that they can have over managers.
Constant Resource Constraints and Demand for Services
In police departments, there is a never-ending demand for services but never enough resources. If there are more resources, there are simply more demands to consume those resources.11 For example, if a police department has a sizeable number of patrol officers, it may have the opportunity to respond to more calls—calls that otherwise would not have been handled, such as keys locked inside of cars, burglar alarms, or missing vehicle license plates. Sometimes attempts to reduce demands result in even more demands. Some police departments use a 311 telephone number for nonemergency calls to alleviate the burden of false emergency calls to 911. The result has been even more phone calls to the police.12 There is also never enough money to operate a police department. Departments can always benefit from having more officers, better or newer equipment, the latest technology, more training, and/or better facilities. As a result, departmental budgets are never sufficient.
Photo 3.3 Police officers and their supervisors work together to try to accomplish an agency’s goals, with supervisors directing the activities of officers. On occasion, however, there is conflict between street cops and management cops.
John Moore/Getty Images
Ambiguous and Difficult-to-Achieve Goals
The goals of police organizations are difficult to specify and even more difficult to achieve; therefore, it may also be difficult to determine what exactly constitutes good policing. The difficulty of adequately defining good policing has implications for all of police management. For example, if the goals of an organization are unclear, how does one determine who would best be able to accomplish those goals? And how does one determine good performance of employees?
When dealing with ambiguous and difficult-to-achieve goals, police departments have a tendency to focus on the means of reaching goals over the goals themselves or to substitute means for goals. As noted previously, this has been referred to as the means over ends syndrome.13 For instance, making arrests is often portrayed as a goal when in actuality it is probably best considered a means to a goal. The police often present the number of calls to which they respond as a measure of performance, although this statistic says nothing about the quality of services provided. For these reasons, ambiguous and difficult-to-achieve goals represent a major challenge in managing police departments.
A Question to Consider 3.1 The Means and Ends of Policing
Police departments are good at counting and tallying activities of officers. Some even keep track of the number of miles patrolled by officers during their work shifts, and this information becomes part of performance evaluations. How might this information be legitimately useful? How might it reflect the means over ends syndrome?
The Structure of Police Departments
For the most part, police departments of a similar size are structured in the same way. There are also some similarities in structure between very large departments and very small departments. There are also significant differences between large and small departments, however. One of the biggest is the amount of specialization present in the organization. As noted, specialization refers to the number of distinct units within the organization as well as the number of supervisory levels in the organization.
The problems and priorities of large departments are also different than those of smaller departments. In addition, diversity among officers tends to vary by department size. Overall, approximately 27% of sworn officers are racial or ethnic minorities, although larger departments are generally much more racially diverse than smaller ones.14 This same pattern applies to the representation of female officers (see A Research Question).
One aspect of police operations that does not vary significantly by police department size is the technology that is available to officers (see Technology on the Job feature).
The Structure of Three Police Departments of Different Sizes
As examples of the structure of three municipal police departments of varying sizes, below are the organizational charts from the River Hills Police Department in Wisconsin (Figure 3.3), the Watertown Police Department in Massachusetts (Figure 3.4), and the Houston Police Department in Texas (Figure 3.5). Although the organizational charts of each department look quite different, notice that there are also similarities.
A Research Question
What Is the Relationship Between Police Department Size and the Representation of Female Officers?
Overall, approximately 12% of sworn officers are female, but the representation of female officers varies considerably by department size (Figure 3.2).
A study was conducted to identify the characteristics of police departments that were associated with greater representation of female officers.15 Using data from approximately 4,000 agencies, the authors found that a greater representation of female officers was associated not only with department size but also with factors such as higher education requirements, greater benefits and pay, fewer physical fitness screening criteria, no collective bargaining (police labor union), and a departmental community policing orientation. The research clearly shows that certain policies and other characteristics of police agencies have a clear impact on the degree to which they are gender diverse.
Figure 3.2 Full-Time Sworn Personnel by Gender and Size of Department, 2013
Source: Brian A. Reaves. 2015. Local Police Departments, 2013: Personnel, Policies, and Practices. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. Table 4.
Technology on the Job
Police Department Size and Technology
As we have discussed, there are structural and personnel differences between large and small police departments. Interestingly, however, as seen in Table 3.1, there are relatively few differences between such departments in terms of the technology that is used by officers, especially video technology. The biggest differences are with body-worn cameras, which tend to be used more by smaller departments, and license plate readers and drones, which larger departments are more likely to deploy.
As such, it is not accurate to say that smaller departments are less advanced technologically than larger departments. However, as mentioned in the Police Spotlight feature at the introduction to the chapter, the local tax base and the amount of money available in communities for police services will strongly influence departmental operations,