Police Organization and Management Issues for the Next Decade

This paper offers some thoughts about issues of police organization and management to which researchers and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) should attend in the next five-to-ten years. Given the framework NIJ has established for the three papers at this workshop, I take the domain of police organization and management to include how to staff, structure, direct, and equip public (local) police organizations.1 I have been asked specifically to cover the topics of recruitment, training, structure and organization, management and leadership, technology and information use, and community policing. I will not pretend to offer a comprehensive review of the many important issues that fall within these domains, since a volume could easily be devoted to each, and unfortunately time does not permit an extensive review of the extant literature on the topics I have selected for discussion. For each area I will describe what I regard as a few of the important issues that deserve the attention of police researchers. I will select issues that are important, both from an academic perspective (that is, intellectually interesting), and from a practical perspective (that is, useful for improving the quality of police organizations and police performance). Regarding the “community policing” category, I have expanded that to include a wide range of recent innovations, some of which bear little or no relationship to community policing but which have received considerable attention over the last two decades.

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http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/218584.pdf