Chapter 5 Law Enforcement

  • The Quasi- Military Style police Organizations - American law law enforcement agencies are organized along quasi military lines, they resemble the military in some but not all respects 

  • The police are different from the military in several important respects 

  • Citizens 

  • Services 

  • Laws/Rights/Discretion 

  • The Dominant Style of American Police Organization- A pyramidal model of government administration in which tasks are grouped into separate bureaus or departments and information flows up and down according to the hierarchical structure. Marked by diffuse authority, visible divisions of labor, and inflexible rules of operation, each employee answers to one supervisor, creating a uniform and clear chain of command

  • The modern bureaucracy has the following characteristic: 

  • Complex

  • Tasks

  • Hierarchical

  • Delegation

  • Responsibility 

  • Unity 

  • Rules & Regulations

  • Information

  • Career Paths

  • The Problems with Bureaucracy- Bureaucracies are often rigid, inflexible, and unable to adapt to external changes. Communication within large bureaucracies often gets broken down, so that information does not reach the person who needs it, so bad decisions are made, or conflicting goals are pursued.

The positive contributions of bureaucracy in policing. This is established by looking at the past and seeing what has worked going forward 

  • Special units

  • Discretion

  • Administrative rules 

  • Two types of protective cliques:

  • Vertical- different rank officers talking about work stuff

  • Horizontal- similar ranked officers negative gossip

  • Two schools of thought on how to change police organizations:

  • Dominant- if it aint broke dont fix it

  • Other (alternative) 

  • Attempts to modify the police organization through the use of De-bureaucratization

  • Decentralize 

  • De-fromalize

  • De- specialize

  • De-layerize 

  • Five major advantages to using multi-agency task forces 

  • No Duplication

  • Availability 

  • Shared Resources 

  • Authority 

  • More information


COMPSTAT- An organizational model, first used by the New York City Police in 1994, that allows police departments to blend timely intelligence, effective tactics, rapid deployment of personnel and vigorous follow up and assessment 

Six Key elements features associated with COMPSTAT

  • Classification

  • Accountability 

  • Authority 

  • Resources 

  • Data 

  • Innovation

  • Civil Service- A universal set of formal and legally binding procedures governing personnel decisions in government are based on objective criteria and not on favoritism, bias, or political influence.

  • Seniority Hierarchy- Based on years of sentence 

  • Rank Hierarchy- Rank in Department 

  • Reward Hierarchy- Combined Rank/Seniority 

  • Status Hierarchy - Assignments

Civil service agencies are responsible for developing:

  • Job description 

  • Recruitment 

  • Promotion 

  • Testing

  • Discipline 

  • Appeals 

  • Major police unions:

  • Fraternal Order of Police

  • Interional Union of Police Associations 

  • Teamsters Law Enforcement League 

  • Policemen's Benevolent Association 

    Collective Bargaining- The method of determining conditions of employment through bilateral negotiations 

    Basic Principles:

  • Legal Right 

  • Recognition 

  • Participation

  • Required/ Representatives

    Grievance Procedures- a typical procedure requires that an officer be notified about a disciplinary action and that the officer has the right to a hearing, the right to an attorney, and the right to appeal any disciplinary action.

The impact of Police Unions- Unions have had an impact on discipline and accountability by introducing due process into discipline procedures, limiting the power of police chiefs to arbitrarily or unfairly discipline officers, and opposing citizens oversight of the police

Contingency Theory- A theoretical framework for understanding the structures and practices of police organizations based on the underlying premise that these organizations are created and structured to achieve specific goals, such as crime control, will ultimately fail if unstable to adjust to environmental continues

Police Organizations and their environment 

Institutional theory 

Hold that police organizations are social institutions that operate in relation to their external social political environment

Resource dependency theory 

Organizations must obtain resources to survive and the to obtain these resources they must engage in exchanges with other organizations in their environment