Managing police work

Seven articles explore defining and measuring the police role, human resources planning, professionalism, internal communications, and police-citizen interactions. A model for assessing police crime control effectiveness emphasizes organizational and environmental factors affecting crime prevention goals. Urban police agencies should consider adopting a social planning perspective, measuring effectiveness by how well police serve the actual users of their services rather than the abstract 'public.' An analysis of police personnel planning finds that external factors (e.g., labor supply, economic trends) affecting data collection should be incorporated into any planning effort. An examination of professionalism concludes that police meet few of the criteria for professional standing and that it would be dangerous to award police professional privileges, such as confidentiality. A discussion of citizen complaints against urban police suggests that minorities' (particularly blacks) assessments of police performance are negatively affected by police practices. Analyses based on the Managerial Grid and Johari Window measures help synthesize current thinking about police managers' leadership and communication styles. Examining internal communications from the perspective of the individual officer, researchers find a moderate to weak association between officers' assessments of communications and job satisfaction. These findings are consistent with ethnographic interpretations and cast doubt on administrative assumptions derived from organizational and motivation theory. The articles include references and study data.