Contributors to this anthology examine how the police go about policing themselves in the real world. Police officers enjoy considerable autonomy and discretion, which makes strict accountability and close supervision the exception. In the lower ranks, mutual back-scratching, the code of silence, and the falsified report, can be used to cover up work avoidance, short-cut methods, illicit violence, and pay-offs. In spite of this, there are clearly constraints on police behavior in the form of both written and unwritten institutional controls. This book probes the various sources of organizational control, including: formal internal disciplinary regulations, the norms and values of the occupational culture, external legal constraints, and the overriding need to prevent scandals. The authors also suggest improving organizational control through managerial reforms to promote not just proficient bureaucrats, but leaders who possess insight into, and empathy for, the inescapable dilemmas of the men and women on the front lines.

Built on a foundation of nearly 1,200 references, Leadership and Management in Police Organizations is a highly readable text that shows how organizational theory and behavior can be applied to improve the operations, leadership, and management of law enforcement. Author Matthew J. Giblin emphasizes leadership and management as separate skills in successful police supervisors and executives, illustrating to students how the two skills combine to improve individual and organizational efficacy in policing. Readers will come away with a stronger understanding of why organizational decisions matter and the impact research can have on police departments.

This book explores the forces that are undermining the orthodoxy in police organization and management and presents a new way of thinking about the organization and management of police departments. The proposed method borrows the concept of corporate strategy from the private sector and adapts it for use in the public sector. The proposed application of a corporate strategy to police management involves the choice of purpose, the molding of organizational identity and character, the continuing definition of what needs to be done, and the mobilization of resources for the attainment of goals in the face of aggression competition or adverse circumstances. This book uses the concept of corporate strategy to help define the goals of policing. Another chapter analyzes how the police might conceive the management of their relations with the external environment followed by an examination of the implications of corporate strategy for the internal structure and operations of police departments. The final chapter looks to the future as it discusses the requirements for imaginative police leadership.

Because police are the most visible face of government power for most citizens, they are expected to deal effectively with crime and disorder and to be impartial. Producing justice through the fair, and restrained use of their authority. The standards by which the public judges police success have become more exacting and challenging. Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing explores police work in the new century. It replaces myths with research findings and provides recommendations for updated policy and practices to guide it. The book provides answers to the most basic questions: What do police do? It reviews how police work is organized, explores the expanding responsibilities of police, examines the increasing diversity among police employees, and discusses the complex interactions between officers and citizens. It also addresses such topics as community policing, use of force, racial profiling, and evaluates the success of common police techniques, such as focusing on crime "hot spots." It goes on to look at the issue of legitimacyâ€"how the public gets information about police work, and how police are viewed by different groups, and how police can gain community trust. Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing will be important to anyone concerned about police work: policy makers, administrators, educators, police supervisors and officers, journalists, and interested citizens.

Police Innovation and Control of the Police: Problems of Law, Order and Community brings together an impressive array of scholars and analysts to examine the impact of the development of crime control strategies on problems of police corruption and abuse. The text provides an historical overview of the development of legal control of the police, and examines the challenges that recent innovations, such as community or problem oriented policing present to the traditional, historical mechanisms for maintaining control of the police. Additionally, a comparative perspective is featured that draws upon the experiences of the Gorbachev era in the Soviet Union as well as on the history of European law enforcement over the last century. This book is instrumental for encouraging discussion and debate of police innovation and its impact on the ability of society to control the police abuse. In light of the Los Angeles riots of the Spring of 1992, scholars, practitioners, and students of crime prevention studies, criminology, and psychology will find this volume timely, topical, and provocative.

Although most large police organizations perform the same tasks, there is tremendous variation in how individual organizations are structured. To account for this variation, author Edward R. Maguire develops a new theory that attributes the formal structures of large municipal police agencies to the contexts in which they are embedded. This theory finds that the relevant features of an organization's context are its size, age, technology, and environment. Using a database representing nearly four hundred of the nation's largest municipal police agencies, Maguire develops empirical measures of police organizations and their contexts and then uses these measures in a series of structural equation models designed to test the theory. Ultimately, police organizations are shown to be like other types of organizations in many ways but are also shown to be unique in a number of respects.