Compstat and bureaucracy: A case study of challenges and opportunities for change

COMPSTAT has been heralded as an innovative and rational crime control program, but our research shows that its implementation presents police departments with a set of opportunities and challenges. Using Weber's theory of bureaucracy, we present a case study demonstrating how COMPSTAT's key elements are shaped by extant organizational arrangements. In renewing an emphasis on the crime-fighting goal and the command hierarchy of the Lowell Police Department, the study site, COMPSTAT presented an opportunity to reinforce certain traditional features of police bureaucracy. However, by strengthening control through its accountability mechanism, COMPSTAT interfered with its own operation. Furthermore, the persistence of other bureaucratic features—functional specialization, formalization, routine, uniformity, and secrecy—limited organizational change. Our case suggests that the most significant challenge for any department is picking the compromise between existing bureaucratic features and COMPSTAT's core elements that most suits its needs and those of its constituencies.     

The commemoration of death,organizational memory,and police culture

Police scholars document that although there is fragmentation of the so‐called “monolithic” police culture, historically consistent features of the occupational culture of police exist. By drawing on ethnographic observations in three U.S. police departments, I describe how one consistent feature of police culture—the preoccupation with danger and potential death—is maintained by the commemoration of officers killed in the line of duty. Through the use of commemorative cultural artifacts, officers and departments construct an organizational memory that locally reflects and reifies the salience of danger and potential death in policing. Furthermore, commemoration of fallen officers is not restricted to a department's own; the dead of other departments are commemorated by distant police organizations and their officers, maintaining broad, occupational assumptions of dangerous and deadly police work that transcend a single department and its localized organizational memory. Implications for the study of police culture, inequalities in policing, and police reform are considered.     

Does Minority Representation in Police Agencies Reduce Assaults on the Police?

Following recent high-profile deaths of unarmed African American suspects at the hands of police, a number of reforms have been proposed, among them improved minority representation in the ranks of law enforcement organizations. Previous research has explored the effects of minority representation on complaints against the police and other behaviors, but very few studies have examined violence toward the police. We merged several data sources together and tested the hypothesis that minority representation within police departments is inversely associated with assaults against the police. In an extension of prior research, we also conducted separate analyses for African American, Hispanic, and Asian officer representation. The results did not support the expectation that diversity within police organizations results in improved police-citizen interactions, as measured by assaults on police. This study is one of the few to examine how different measures of minority representation in police agencies relates to assaults on the police.     

An uneasy look at college education and the police organization

A college education has been increasingly perceived as a necessary requirement for policing because of the recommendations of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals and other, equally prestigious commissions, and because of a desire of the police to be more “professional.” Research on the value of a college education for police officers has not been sufficiently critical or rigorous, nor has it taken into account the conflict between some of the perceived benefits of higher education and the traditional organizational structure of police departments. Before committing our resources irrevocably, careful research needs to be undertaken on the value of a college education in light of existing organizational structure and also in light of some alternate structures.     

Predicting the employment of minority officers in U.S. cities: OLS fixed-effect panel model results for African American and Latino officers for 1993, 1996, and 2000

Using panel data collected on a representative sample of police departments serving populations of 25,000+ residents across the country in 1993, 1996, and 2000 (N = 281), fixed-effect panel models were used to assess the influence of environmental and institutional variables on the hiring of African American and Latino officers. The primary findings were that the presence of a substantial minority population was among the most important predictors of minority officer employment in city police departments. The presence of a Latino mayor and the presence of an African American or a Latino police chief were also significantly associated with increased minority police officer employment. Additionally, no evidence was found to suggest a detrimental impact caused by different minority groups competing with each other for limited police employment resources. Implications for future research are discussed in some detail.     

Organizational stressors and police performance

This study examines the impact organizational stressors have on police performance. Evidence on police stress is mixed whether or not the nature of police work is inherently stressful. A growing body of research suggests police officers are no more stressed than other groups and police work is not especially stressful. Instead, organizational stressors may be a greater source of stress due to various structural arrangements, policies and practices. This cross-sectional study uses survey data (n = 461) from two large urban police departments in Michigan and New Jersey. Multiple regression predicts lower performance as perceived stressors increase and paired-sample t test reveals organizational stressors are significantly different from operational stressors. The results imply the need for structural changes in police organizations. Future research should examine police performance in smaller and mid-size police agencies as well as suburban and rural agencies and widen the participant pool to include superior officers and civilian personnel.     

Data Breach,Privacy, and Cyber Insurance: How Insurance Companies Act as “Compliance Managers” for Businesses

While data theft and cyber risk are major threats facing organizations, existing research suggests that most organizations do not have sufficient protection to prevent data breaches, deal with notification responsibilities, and comply with privacy laws. This article explores how insurance companies play a critical, yet unrecognized, role in assisting organizations in complying with privacy laws and dealing with cyber theft. My analysis draws from and contributes to two literatures on organizational compliance: new institutional organizational sociology studies of how organizations respond to legal regulation and sociolegal insurance scholars' research on how institutions govern through risk. Through participant observation at conferences, interviews, and content analysis of insurer manuals and risk management services, my study highlights how insurers act as compliance managers for organizations dealing with cyber security threats. Well beyond pooling and transferring risk, insurance companies offer cyber insurance and unique risk management services that influence the ways organizations comply with privacy laws.     

Global knowledge intensive enterprises and international technology transfer: emerging perspectives from a quadruple helix environment

Management scholars have widely acknowledged that we live a new era of economic development, the so-called knowledge economy, where knowledge appears to be the key foundation of value creation. During the recent years, it seems like knowledge has become an all-embracing term that has come to stand for all the magic that goes on within contemporary organizations, making them successful. Knowledge is then an immaterial and ubiquitous asset, embodied into individuals and embedded in their routines and artefacts. From this shadowy asset arises the main research purpose of several management scholars: to ascertain the underlying organizational alchemy and the mystery of knowledge. In the managerial literature, when knowledge comes so deeply incorporated within a firm this has been usually reflected in a widely used concept: the knowledge-intensive enterprise, a term that has received significant attention from scholars and researchers, now expressing a category of organizations within academic scientific research. Likewise, a growing debate is emerging among policy makers and scholars in technology transfer processes and tools for KIEs worldwide.     

Unpredictable and monetized contact with the police: Race,avoidance behaviors,and modified activity spaces

Exponential growth in order maintenance policing and associated misdemeanor sanctions have led to disproportionate consequences for people of color. Using data from qualitative interviews with individuals in the metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri, region, the current study documents the racialized and monetized nature of police contact. This work extends extant scholarship by considering how minor contact with the police shapes individual avoidance behaviors and activity spaces, places where people work and live. We consider how the combination of monetary sanctions, warrants, incarceration, and overpolicing in the region affects avoidance behaviors, particularly for people of color. Our findings suggest that the frequently unpredictable nature of police contacts and the parochial and often profit-focused structure of policing organizations in the region leads individuals to modify the ways in which they move through the region and, for some, to isolate. Narratives reflect the need for constant calibration of behaviors and decisions, as well as the legacy that police contact and monetary sanctions can have on everyday routines.     

POLICE MISCONDUCT AS ORGANIZATIONAL DEVIANCE

The aim of this paper is to extend and clarify the organizational deviance perspective by focusing on police misconduct. Toward that end the paper defines organizational deviance and police misconduct, illustrates the linkages between natural persons and deviant departments, and considers the public policy implications of viewing police misconduct as organizational deviance.     

New Public Management and the Police Profession at Play

This article explores the ways in which competing institutional logics influence the knowledge base of the police, ideas about good police practice and organizational identities. A tension between the humanistic professional police logic and the instrumental New Public Management (NPM) logic is discussed in the context of policing. While the humanistic professional police logic gradually emerged in the 1960s and 70s, over the past twenty years the police force has been reformed in line with the NPM logic. Through qualitative interviews and a quantitative study of the police force, the article investigates the ways in which the ideas of what constitutes a normative good practice are shaped in relation to these two, opposing, logics. A central finding is that despite many years of NPM as the dominant steering logic, a humanistic professional logic persists. However, the shift towards the NPM logic transforms the knowledge base in a more evidence-oriented direction and affects the ideas of normative good practice, especially among police management.     

Police organizational factors,the racial composition of the police,and the probability of arrest

While past research has considered the effects of police organizational characteristics on various outcomes, including arrest rates, relatively little research has explored the role of the racial composition of the police and its association with race‐specific arrest rates. Furthermore, no research has explored the association between arrest probabilities for Black and White offenders and police organizational factors. Using data from the 2000 National Incident‐Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the 2000 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), and the 2000 decennial Census, the present exploratory study employs multilevel modeling to examine the association between police organizational factors including the percentage of the police force that is Black and arrest probabilities for offenders involved in 19,099 aggravated assaults and 100,859 simple assaults across 105 small cities. Results show that for simple assaults, the relative size of the Black police force is associated with the risk of arrest for both Black and White offenders. Furthermore, departments with relatively more Black police officers are found to have the largest gap in the arrest probabilities for White and Black offenders, although Whites are more likely to be arrested for assaults than Blacks, regardless of the racial composition of the police. Results also show those departments with more written policy directives, relatively larger administrative component, a higher educational‐level requirement, and centralized police departments have the highest arrest probabilities. Implications of these findings and recommendations for further research are discussed.     

About the authors

The present research evaluates the hypothesis that dimensions of police organizational structure germane to police reformers may be affected by the dynamics of organizational size and urbanism, thus constraining the ability of reformers to invoke desired structural changes. Using data gathered from police departments in Illinois, we examined the impact of urbanism and size on four dimensions of agency structure of interest to advocates of police reform: concentration, height or segmentation, civilianization, and supervisory ratio. Size revealed both linear and nonlinear influences on two dimensions of structure. This finding suggests that research on factors affecting organizational structure, typically conducted in large departments, may not generalize to smaller agencies. The authors concluded that the influence of size, though affecting dimensions of organizational structure, was generally too modest to substantially constrain structural variation.     

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A POLICE GANG UNIT: AN EXAMINATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS*

Although researchers have begun to document the programs and activities performed by police gang units, little research has examined why police gang units are created and why they have responded to local gang problems in the way they have over the past 10 years. Using a multimethodological research design, the present study examines the factors that shaped a Midwestern police department's response to its community's gang problem. The results from the present study lend support for the institutional perspective. The data suggest that the gang unit was created as a consequence of pressures placed on the police department from various powerful elements within the community and that, once created, the unit's response was largely driven by its need to achieve and maintain organizational legitimacy.     

Community hierarchy of needs and policing models: toward a new theory of police organizational behavior

This study explains the influences of environmental variables on the emergence of varying policing models. It empirically tests a new perspective on the influences of community variations to police organizational behaviours and practices among local police departments in the U.S. Using the U.S. Census, the Uniform Crime Reports and the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics data, the study tests a perspective suggesting that community hierarchy of needs influences the degree level of the implementation of different models of policing, particularly community policing. The study presents constructs to operationalize hierarchy of needs. Multiple regression analyses were used to examine the relationships of hierarchy of needs, organizational factors, and other control variables to police departments’ pursuit of different policing models. Findings suggest that community hierarchy of needs and organizational factors significantly constrain the departments’ implementation of policing models. Lower hierarchy of needs tends to be associated with pursuit of traditional policing while a community with higher level needs tend to pursue community policing. Similarly, organizational complexities influence the implementation of different policing models.     

Compstat in Australia: An analysis of the spatial and temporal impact

One of the major trends in policing sweeping across democratic societies since the mid-1990s is a management approach commonly known as COMPSTAT. Despite widespread global adoption, empirical evaluation of the impact of COMPSTAT lags behind popular accounts of its crime control benefits.

Purpose

This article evaluates the crime control impact of Queensland Police Service's version of COMPSTAT known as “Operational Performance Reviews” (OPRs).

Method

A mixed model analytic approach was used to assess the role of OPRs in explaining spatial and temporal variations in crime patterns across Queensland's 29 police districts.

Results

Analysis of the impact of OPRs on reported crime (specifically assaults, robberies and unlawful entries) suggests major differences between police districts, and that some districts are driving overall statewide crime reductions, whilst others confound positive effects of implementation of OPRs in Queensland.

Conclusions

The results demonstrate that the crime drop experienced throughout Queensland found in prior research (Mazerolle et al., 2007) is most likely attributable to a small number of police districts. The implication of these findings is that a number of districts could (and should) be called-upon during maturation of Queensland's OPRs to reduce specific crime problems in their districts and facilitate ongoing crime reductions across the state.     

The Prevalence of Female Representation in Supervisory and Management Positions in American Law Enforcement: An Examination of Organizational Correlates

Increasing gender diversity in American policing has long been a focus of reform efforts since the 1960s. Although the proportion of women in the profession improved initially and research has focused on the gender breakdown of police organizations in general, less scholarly and empirical attention has been directed to female representation in positions of power (i.e., supervisory and management roles). Using data from the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey, the current study examined the prevalence as well as the organizational correlates of female representation in supervisory (e.g., sergeants), mid-level management (e.g., lieutenants) and chief executive roles in departments across the United States. The findings indicate a number of factors associated with female representation in supervisory and mid-level management positions, including the size and type of agencies, geographic region of the country, and potential indicators of professionalism. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Police Accountability and the Media

This article explores First Amendment theory and the role of the media in generating police accountability through public understanding of police organizations. We argue that free speech theory can and should look beyond "abridgment" issues and raise questions about the civic responsibility of the press to inform the public about key governmental institutions. The media's concern with crime news, we found, vastly overshadows its coverage of the police us a complex, in-teresting, and expensive governmental agency. Reporting about police institutional patterns and policies contributes more toward fulfilling First Amendment values-not only that of "checking" police excesses, but of facilitating the goal of enlightened citizen participation in local government.
Those who won our independence believed…that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject.     

PROBLEMS AND STRATEGIES IN GAINING RESEARCH ACCESS IN POLICE ORGANIZATIONS

“Access” is conceived of as involving passage through two gates: one manned by the top-level authority figures of the organization, and the other by the proposed subjects of one's study. Within this framework, informal contacts, contingent acceptance at successive organizational levels, and self-selection are identified and discussed as the factors most central to an understanding of our successful access into three police organizations and our failures to gain access to two police organizations.