Police Scholars Research Articles

The Meaning of Compstat

Policing is presently undergoing a paradigm shift. One of the new models of police operations, Compstat, has been widely touted as an effective and efficient method of delivering police services. It also has been critiqued and criticized by police scholars. The authors consider these criticisms and offer their interpretations of the meaning of Compstat.

From Rhetoric to Reality: How Police Officers View the Implementation of Generalized Community Policing

Research literature on community policing has focused on its impact on police organizations or citizens, especially in jurisdictions where community policing was a specialized police function. Less is known about how police officers experience the process of implementing community policing, particularly when it is a generalized function affecting an entire organization and all of its employees. Using data from a midwestern agency, this study examines the way in which front line officers and supervisors experienced the implementation of a generalized community policing philosophy. Specific attention is given to factors that influenced the attitudes and experiences of those most directly affected by this organizational change. Findings suggest that perceptions and experiences were largely a product of the beliefs and attitudes of the individual officers. Implications for police managers and scholars are discussed.

Policing in the People's Republic of China. The Road to Reform in the 1990s

Under Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, China has been transformed from a backward state‐planned economy into a modern market‐driven one. The economic reform has changed China socially, politically, and culturally (Burton 1990). The ‘gongan’ or public security has been a part of that transformation process. During the last 13 years (1978–2001), the public security apparatus has changed its role and functions, core values, leadership, organization structure and process, management philosophy and operational procedures and practices. This article reviews recent public security reform measures and change process, focusing on developments in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was the ‘radical reform’ period, leading up to the Police Law of 1995. Subsequent developments, not discussed here, are more evolutionary in character. This paper is part of a larger research enterprise entitled ‘Police Reform in the People's Republic of China Project’ sponsored by the Chinese Law Programme, Chinese University of Hong Kong. One major aim of the project is to build up an accessible English literature on PRC policing for China‐bound criminal justice students and/or comparative police scholars.

Supervisory styles of patrol sergeants and lieutenants

Scholars across academic disciplines have advanced theories identifying leadership styles. While these theoretical approaches have been used in a variety of settings, few police scholars have adapted these frameworks for a comprehensive study of patrol supervision. The present study uses these frameworks to identify underlying attitudinal constructs of supervisory styles from data collected for the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), a systematic observational study of patrol officers and first-line supervisors in two metropolitan police departments. Through factor analyses, four distinct supervisory styles (traditional, innovative, supportive, and active) are identified and thoroughly described. Supervisors are classified as having one of these four primary styles of supervision and the distribution of these supervisory styles is examined along with differences in supervisor behavior. Implications for policy and research are explored.

Organizational change and organizational development: Performance modeling and strategic planning for community policing

It has been perceived that the police were historically an organization which derived its authority and legitimacy from the public. Contemporary police scholars have suggested that the professional model of policing does not control crime and that the police should focus more attention on community issues which generate crime and urban decay. The concept of community policing has received national attention. Yet there are relatively few examples of debates which have abandoned the failed professional model and successfully made the transition to community policing. This article addresses the issue of organizational change and organizational development in relation to community policing and performance modeling.

Policy restrictiveness and police pursuits

Police officers frequently receive criticism for excessive use of force and, at times, the criticism becomes litigation. The use of excessive force is manifest in areas such as the unauthorized use of firearms and the videotaped and much publicized beating of motorist Rodney King. However, recently police scholars and practitioners have come to realize that the use of police vehicle pursuits also have the potential to become deadly force. This issue is appearing with increasing frequency and it has resulted in the case of Sacramento County et al. v. Lewis being appealed to and decided by the US Supreme Court. This article analyzes the consequences of police departments having more, or less, restrictive policies in regard to police vehicle pursuits. Different elements of policy restrictiveness also are examined.

A textual interpretation of police organization: The dark side of technology

A recent trend among police scholars has been to multiply qualitative research approaches with regard to the study of police organizations. One such method, sometimes called textual interpretation, is hermeneutics. We apply this method to an essay written in the late 1930s about the increasingly technological nature of social organizations under the title The failure of technology: Perfection without purpose. Our intent, by way of studying this important essay, is to interpret what it has to say about the nature of organizations ‐ in this case, police organizations ‐ and the social problems these organizations are created to address. We first discuss the hermeneutic tradition in general and its application to the social sciences in particular. We then apply this approach to knowing to the failure of technology with an eye to the essay's implications for the increasing technical nature of police organizations. Finally, we discuss how police organizations might begin to respond to this increase in technics. This interpretation illustrates a way in which hermeneutics can be useful in scholarship directed toward the police sciences.

Excessive force: A comparative study of police in the Caribbean*

Police scholars attribute police use of excessive force to various factors including individual characteristics, situational contingencies, organizational determinants and leadership styles. Most research investigating the determinants of excessive use of force concerns deadly force among urban police agencies in developed nations, primarily the United States. Only recently has research attention focused on excessive force that is less than lethal. This research reports the findings of a study on police perceptions regarding the use of less-than-lethal excessive force in three Caribbean nations. A model is developed based on current literature from developed nations that specifies the relationships among situational, individual, and organizational factors and the use of excessive force as measured by observations, interviews, and surveys. A questionnaire collected data from 672 street-level constables and their immediate supervisors. Observations of constables, interviews with their supervisors, and interviews with command personnel provided the remainder of the data analyzed here. The findings suggest that the determinants of perceived excessive use of force are similar in some respects and different in others between developing nations of the Caribbean and developed nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Policy implications for the control of excessive force in developing nations are discussed.

Interrogating Richard Leo's Claims about Police Scholarship

In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in “Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience.” He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is “impoverished theoretically” and “often not worth reading” (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the policy audience. He contrasts current scholarship with a golden age of police inquiry, the 1960s, in which theoretical breakthroughs were common, and scholars were driven by their critical instincts rather than by material interests. His review of current works is narrower than most published in the Review, covering only two monographs published in the 1990s, and holding out but one (Bayley 1994) as evidence of all that is wrong with contemporary, sociolegal inquiry of policing.

An empirical assessment of Niederhoffer's police cynicism scale

For some time there has been an intensive effort among police scholars to determine the attitudes of law enforcement personnel. Their efforts have focused particularly on the determinants of police cynicism. However, to date, there has only been one attempt to construct an index estimating that attitude—Niederhoffer's in 1967. Thus, all discussions of police cynicism rest on that index. This paper examines for the first time the reliability and validity of that instrument on a separate population of police personnel. The results were significant. First, it is shown that the index has an extremely low reliability and validity. Then, it is revealed that the index is tapping at least five separate dimensions of cynicism—not one, as police scholars so frequently assert. The implications from this research are great. The most obvious is that it is time to stop discussing the “cynical cop.” Instead, social scientist can begin specifying toward which dimensions of the occupation officers with particular traits are likely to become cynical. Second, the findings indicate the need to develop additional measures of police cynicism that are more reliable and valid than the sole existing index.