Police departments under social science scrutiny

Journal

ofCriminal

Justice,

Vol. 5, pp. 105-118 (1977). Pergamon Press. Printed in U.S.A.

POLICE DEPARTMENTS

UNDER SOCIAL SCIENCE SCRUTINY

DOROTHYGUYOT School of Criminal Justice Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey 07102

ABSTRACT i’%e common flaw in research on police work is the failure to observe principles of organizational analysis. This is often the result of treating individual police officers, rather than the department, as the unit of analysis. Here we review the design of eight recent studies selected to illustrate both the usual neglect and the occasional sophisticated application of three organizational principles. These principles are: attention to organizational unity; analysis of subgroups; and examination of the organizational environmen t.

The organizational element of police work is woefully neglected in much of our thinking about police. Most studies treat individual police officers as the unit of analysis and do not take the total organization seriously. This article argues that several principles from organizational research should be applied to our current understanding of police departments to make research both sophisticated and more useful to police managers. The organizational approach to the study of police work is so simple and straightforward that to set down principles appears to belabor the obvious. But I believe every researcher should seriously consider these principles as they are often overlooked in the analysis of police work. 1. Treat each police department as a unit. II. Structure analysis in terms of subgroups within each police organization. III. Recognize that each police department operates in an environment crowded with other organizations. Organizations are groupings of people that are deliberately constructed. Organizations tend to have a proper name, definable boundaries. members who enter and leave while the organization endures. a leadership composed of office holders who make commitments on behalf of the organization. and a set of organizational goals.’ The members ordinarily interact with some

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frequency. Their interactions create organizational characteristics that are more than the sum of the individuals’ characteristics. An organization can possess homogeneity, but individuals do not. Organizational complexity can be measured in terms of hierarchical levels and specialized units that participate in a division of labor. Cohesion, the degree to which subgroups of an organization work in complementary fashion, is another obvious collective characteristic. Then there are such diffuse but useful concepts as organizational climate and organizational style. Use of these concepts brings out a police department’s organizational identity. Principles for research on organizations are not dry scientism but policy-relevant guidelines for understanding. We will illustrate the relevance of the principles by applying them to the police response to the civil disorders of the 1960s and then will develop the full argument in the course of reviewing eight recent studies. 1. The organization as a unit. Amid irresponsible cries for national action against rioters, the professional staff of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) quietly recognized that each city’s police department would carry primary responsibility for maintaining order and safeguarding lives. Taking stock of the 1967 riots. the IACP staff developed a contingency planning approach. They treated each major police department as a unit, and brought the chiefs of these departments to Washington for a series of training sessions. Each chief gained a background for developing the department’s contingency plans for containing disorders with minimum loss of life. When the tragic assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 triggered riots across the nation, the levels of violence were lower than in 1967 since police departments implemented locally tailored plans. Immediately afterwards, the IACP conducted a study of disturbances in eight cities by sending a field representative to each to collect comparable data. This short-term response to disorder illustrates a principle that is second nature to practitioners, that each police department must be treated as a whole, discrete unit. Consider, alternatively, as a ludicrous example, what neglect of the principle could entail. Suppose the IACP had issued a flock of national plans for riot control, one designed for the night platoon, another for days, and one each for detectives, juvenile officers, traffic, and command personnel. However wisely the research behind each of these plans might have defined the tasks for the departmental subgroups, a police chief would have to be a wizard to conjure a coordinated departmental policy out of them. 2. Analysis of subgroups. The second principle was neglected in a long-term response to of police-community relations units. Although policethe riots, i.e., the proliferation community relations units generally achieve their aims of establishing communication and trust between their members and citizens, strained relations between these units and the patrol division vitiate these achievements. Community relations officers tend to present themselves as the “good cops” in contrast to the patrol officers who are cast as the “bad guys.” Patrol officers tend to disparage community relations officers, doubting that they are real cops. When patrol officers have opportunities to cement personal understanding with citizens from minority groups, they seldom follow through, with the rationale that this is the job of the community relations unit. Research has only belatedly recognized this basic failure of police-community relations units because of the unwarranted assumption that the rapport the specialists achieved somehow spilled over to the department. Subgroup analysis, however, would have pointed up the following general facts of organizational life: whenever a specialist unit is created, it forms a basis for intradepartmental rivalry; the unit’s status will be congruent with the status of its tasks; and the unit’s presence reduces the generalist’s attention to the task area of the specialists. 3. Cognizance of the organizational environment. However skillfully a police department

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handles its city’s riot, the long-term developments in minority group-police confrontations depend to a great extent on the actions of other organizations in that city. At a minimum, the following organizations need to be considered: those giving leadership to the minority communities, the city council and the political parties, and that great array of agencies that address the conditions of deprivation underlying the riots-agencies for welfare, education, housing inspection, health, and all other social services. The action and inaction of these organizations greatly influence how relations develop between a police department and members of the minority community. Just as police working alone cannot maintain order, so the researcher cannot assess the performance of a police department without knowing the performance of other relevant agencies. In sketching how organizational principles can be applied to police response to the riots of the 196Os, we have illustrated the utility of three organization principles discussed. THE ORGANIZATION

AS A UNIT

James Q. Wilson, in his pioneering comparative study, Varieties of Police Behavior (1968), set a standard by taking the concept of organization seriously. His typology of departmental styles set out the pattern of differences between organizations by treating eight police departments as discrete entities. Not only did Wilson demonstrate that the role of patrol officer is different in what he described as “night watchman,” “legalistic”, and “service-oriented” departments, but also that the sum of patrol officer actions produces different statistical patterns of arrests and summonses. Further, Wilson showed how the different working styles of the departments correlated with organizational characteristics-stiffness of entrance requirements, height of pay scales, and degree of specialization. The flaws of the study, the superficial handling of some crucial areas, do not detract from its worth as an example of the sound application of all three principles discussed in this review. Unfortunately, many studies, even some of high quality, have ignored the principle of analysis by organizational unit. Foremost of these is Police Personnel Practices in State and Local Governments, a study directed by Terry Eisenberg (1973) on behalf of the IACP and the Police Foundation. A comprehensive questionnaire of over five-hundred items solicited data from all law enforcement agencies employing fifty or more sworn officers. Forty-four state agencies, 74 county agencies, and 375 municipal agencies replied with impressive response rates of ninety-four percent, fifty-three percent, and seventy-eight percent, respectively. The data cover the whole range of important issues in personnel practices: employment of minority group members, women, and ex-offenders; entrance standards; allocation of manpower to functions; use of nonsworn personnel. The great potential value of the data is not realized because the analysis neglects organization as the basic unit. The question that the study set out to answer is, how many departments employ each of the specified personnel practices? The only way that the study presents data is as marginal totals. The first half of the report presents the findings based on all the data aggregated from state, municipal, and county agencies. This process resembles adding together 44 apples, 375 oranges, and 74 bananas to conclude that the average color is orange and that the mean vitamin C content is rather high. Just as none of us typically thinks in terms of aggregated oranges, and bananas, neither do we think in terms of aggregated state troopers, apples, municipal police officers, and sheriffs. Since three-quarters of the agencies are municipal, the first twenty-one tables basically describe police with a slight flavoring from sheriffs and troopers. If the researchers had taken organizational theory seriously they would never have served up such a fruit bowl. Even supposing there might be some compelling reason to

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aggregate data from these very different kinds of police agencies, then the analysts should at least have weighed their sample in terms of response rates. The second half of the report makes a contribution by analyzing the same variables. controlling for type of organization. There are separate analyses for five sizes of municipal departments and for state and county agencies. The study takes each personnel practice as the unit of analysis and concludes with the percent of the various sized departments employ it. For instance, a chief of a large police department can learn that in selection requirements for officers his department is among the seventy percent that require a clinical interview and is also among the twenty-five percent that require pre-employment residency, but he has no way of knowing if his is the only large agency that requires both. The authors’ statement of their accomplishment gives a hint of the pitfall. “Taken as a whole, this report provides a comprehensive and current statement of various personnel practices as they operate in police agencies across the nation” (italics added; Eisenberg. 1973: 1). By making individual practices the unit of analysis, the researchers forgot that it is agences that employ sets of practices. The analysis ends just where it should have begun. After tabulating the distribution of personnel practices across departments to obtain the marginals. the next step would be to take departments as the unit of analysis and discover how departments combine practices. For instance, what patterns of selection practices do departments employ? In these patterns there may be dimensions, such as “openness.” that would show up in high correlations among the practices of hiring minority group members, women. and civilians, and use of lateral entry. An illuminating search for patterns could follow the path that James Q. Wilson has delineated. Taking the variables he used in defining his three ideal types of police department, one can imagine the distribution of the 37.5 municipal departments across this multivariate space. Will the departments cluster around the three types defined by Wilson? Are there many departments exhibiting all or most elements of the “night watchman” style-low salaries, low entrance requirements, little specialization, low staffing, and absence of civilian employees? Do many departments exhibit all the elements of the “legalistic” pattern-high specialization, formal appraisal system, high entrance requirements, and so on? The data could answer all of these questions. The published analysis answers none. When analysts deal with a sample of 493 agencies, it is understandable that individual departments could become lost. However, ihe submerging of organizational identity has also occurred when the sample was only three. Robert Duncan (1973) ignored organization boundaries in 7’he Climate for Change in Tkee Police Departments. He sought to find the relationships between the ways in which police officers perceived four dimensions of change: need, openness, potential, and participation. His sample came from three departments, “Capital City,” “College City,” and “Suburban City.” The data from all 162 questionnaires were lumped together in complete disregard of the three departments studied. We never learn whether any of the departments differ, even on such crucial variables as climate for change. Instead, Duncan aggregated the responses by three organizational levels: patrol officers and detectives. sergeants, and higher ranks. He thus produced a collective patrolman-detective score that he compared to the collective sergeant score. He sacrificed the genuine organizational integrity of a police department for an aggregate fiction called patrolmen-detectives in three departments. He need not have chosen between explanatory factors since a two-way analysis of variance would have answered the empirical question of what percent of the variance in attitudes toward change was explained by level and what by department. In explaining individual-level phenomena, such as attitudes, organizational factors should not be left out of the analys’is. and may prove to have more explanatory power than individual-level factqrs. When conducting analysis at the indivi-

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dual level, organizational characteristics can be treated as dummy variables in regression analysis.

SUBGROUPS:

A DEPARTMENT

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as contextual

variables and incorporated

IS NOT A SACK OF POTATOES

The potato sack view of organizations supposes that individuals inside an organization rub elbows in much the same way as potatoes bump each other. The potato sack theorist is interested in the size of the individual potatoes (the height, race, cynicism of individual officers) but ignores completely the relationships between individuals. Within police departments, as in any formal organization, there are subdivisions, hierarchies, status-groupings, and other formal arrangements. There are also informal relationships, cliques, friendship patterns, and temporary collaborations. Each set of individuals, who have established special relationships among themselves, forms a subgroup. As the term is used here, it refers to individuals who have dealings with each other, not to individuals who merely share a trait, such as being black. Only if the individuals who share the trait establish special patterns of interaction are they considered a subgroup. Jonathan Rubinstein’s (1973) description and analysis of police work in city Police was based on a clear understanding of subgroups. He gathered data on the Philadelphia police department as a participant observer, using the approach of an urban anthropologist. In keeping with his view of policing as work, his subgroup analysis was based on the formal division of labor: patrol officers, wagonmen, operations crews, dispatchers, officers in specialized units, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains. His second basis for distinguishing subgroups was by length of tenure: rookies, officers new to the district. veteran patrolmen. A third set of subgroups that Rubinstein noted were the informal groups composed of sergeants and the officers they trust. Interestingly, Rubinstein briefly states that he does not find germane to his analysis, and thus rarely identifies, the usual individual characteristics that are the stock in trade of sociologistsethnicity. age, education. The use of occupational subgroups is a powerful instrument for explaining the consequences of departmental policy. Too often researchers look merely at the aggregate results of policy. treating the department as a black box, rather than examining subgroups. To illustrate Rubinstein’s approach, let us consider a theme that runs throughout his book-the department’s rigid enforcement of quotas for vice arrests. In Philadelphia, vice work is the responsibility of everyone: special units under a captain, headquarters officers and, most importantly district patrol officers. Each patrol officer knows that more desirable assignments can be gained by making vice arrests-primarily for numbers rackets, but also for crimes involving drugs and liquor. Sergeants, lieutenants, and captains miss no opportunity to remind the officers of the importance of vice arrests and the reshuffling of positions that attends failure. Members of different subgroups all strive to produce vice arrests, but they work separately on the common understanding that no officer asks another officer anything about vice. Most vice arrests are made by a few trusted veteran patrolmen working closely with their sergeant and lieutenant. When a tip reaches the dispatcher. the street supervisor is asked to phone in so the tip can be relayed confidentially. If a rookie develops a lead to a residence, the sergeant will not allow a search warrant. Since judges require that search warrants show previous knowledge of the informant and a period of surveillance. the sergeant gives the warrant to a trusted officer who is skillful at perjury. Even the operations crew assists in filling the quota, for when they do the paper work on a special unit’s vice arrest, they ask that the name of a district officer be added to gain district credit. Officers who make drug arrests typically keep back some drugs to buy informa-

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tion or alternatively to create another arrest by making a plant. In all these activities the rookie has nothing to trade and no information from intimidating people who have committed illegal acts: vagrants, drunks, prostitutes, and homosexuals. The department’s goal in all this activity is to show the public that it is making many vice arrests and hence is not corruptly protecting vice. Rubinstein demonstrates the bitter fruitlessness: in 1970 the department arrested 4,720 people on gambling charges, but only 517 were convicted, and a mere 5 were jailed. Rubinstein’s tracing of the involvement of each subgroup in the enforcement of vice laws shows the different modes by which each subgroup is drawn into committing and protecting illegal acts. This is but one of Rubinsteins’ many findings based on subgroup analysis. When a researcher’s focus is narrow, there is the danger of stumbling into the pitfall of ignoring subgroups. Concentration on proving a particular hypothesis may divert attention from the basic variables of subgroup membership. The typical hypothesis is stated thus: officers with characteristic X perform better than officers without X. Police work is so complex, diverse, and demanding that almost any variable X can be hypothesized to have some influence on performance. When a police department research unit states the hypothesis, X is usually some tangible and handily recorded attribute such as height. When a professor tests the hypothesis, X is typically an attitude elicited on a questionnaire. All too often, neither type of researcher controls for subgroup membership, and thus may walk into the classic trap of spuriouscorrelation. In “A Question of Height,” Raymond Hoobler and J. A. McQueeney (1973) hypothesized that patrolmen over 69 inches tall perform better than shorter officers. Their sample was drawn in 1973 from San Diego where the department had lowered the height requirement from 69 to 57% inches in 1968 and again by another inch in 1971. The study found that height was significantly correlated with citizen complaints, injuries, and auto accidents. For assaults and total work activity the differences were in the expected direction, but did not reach statistical significance. Height made no difference in sick leave and number of arrests. However, these findings cannot be accepted as meaningful because the study made no distinction between the most basic characteristics of subgroups of patrol-tenure, precinct assignment, and tour. All 78 of the officers shorter than 69 inches had been on the job less than five years. On each variable they were compared to every patrolman over 69 inches tall, rookies and twenty-year officers alike. On the only variables where a significant difference appears, 78 short, new officers were compared to more than 800 tall officers. Young officers are probably less skillful than older ones in avoiding citizen complaints and injuries and more often assigned to precincts and tours where more citizens are hostile. San Diego found that fifty-five percent of the assaults occur on the afternoon shift and nineteen percent on days, but fails to note if the new, short officers As for the short officers having more auto accidents, serve disproportionately on afternoons. ask any insurance company about the rate for young men. We can throw some light on the San Diego study by considering the excellent use of subgroup analysis that the Portland Bureau of Police (1973) made in asking whether height, weight, tenure, and assignment affect the probability of an officer being assaulted. It was noted that assaults vary greatly by shift-with eighty percent of all assaults occurring on afternoonsand that officers with greater tenure are likely to work on the low assault shifts. Further, eighty percent of the assaults occurred in the north precinct, an assignment that one suspects officers with seniority avoided. In sum, the Portland study comparing one hundred officers who were assaulted in 1972 with one hundred who were not, finds no significant difference in height. Length of service distinguished the assaulted officers, who averaged 5.8 years experience, from their assault free colleagues with a mean of 13.4 years. Complementary findings came

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from White and Bloch (1975) in a study of height and performance sponsored by the Police Foundation and the IACP. For departments where the data permit controlling for years of service, height was not significantly correlated with performance in ten out of eleven measurements. Let us turn now to the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, and Brown, 1974) where the Police Foundation conducted a rigorous study that observed the boundaries between subgroups. In the design of an experiment, the treatment groups are strictly defined subgroups that must be clearly distinguished. In applying two opposite treatments, the Police Foundation avoided the design flaw of Morse and Reimers (1956) by constructing a third subgroup as a control. Further, the patrol officers assigned to the three treatment areas formed three subgroups of the police department, while officers who actually performed services in each treatment area formed yet another set of subgroups. For the year-long field experiment, fifteen beats, which varied in area from about 0.6 square miles to over 8 square miles, were matched in threes primarily on the basis of ethnicity, reported crime, and income level. Then each set of three beats was assigned one of three patrol strategies. In the reactive areas, there was minimal police patrol presence, estimated at about forty percent of normal; in the control areas there was the usual level of police patrol; and in the proactive areas there was between two and three times the usual intensity. Specialist units, such as traffic and tactical units, maintained their usual levels of service under administrative pressure to not increase their coverage in the reactive areas. The careful conclusions were that this range of variation in the level of patrol made no difference in the levels of crime or in the citizen’s sense of personal safety. The significance of the study is that police departments need not be tied to traditional routine patrol but can use their manpower flexibly to achieve specific crime prevention and service goals. The vehement criticisms of the methods and significance of the experiment arose from one side of a basic split in police groups. Police administrators who have a crime-fighting orientation have long regarded routine patrol as the central preventive strategy and thus considered the findings unacceptable. These administrators believe that police departments should strip away many noncrime-related functions so they can concentrate on crime prevention, detection, and apprehension. From this perspective came an early attack by Chief Edward M. Davis and Lyle Knowles (1975) based on the fifty-page summary report, not the full technical report. The position paper of the IACP (1975) shared this perspective, magnifying trivial flaws of the experiment and technical report into structural defects. The IACP recommended that the findings not be generalized to any city or area that differs from the experimental area of Kansas City in population density, racial composition, economic conditions, crime problems, or history of police-citizen relationships. On the other side, police managers who believe that police should provide a wide range of services, saw the general applicability .of the findings. These administrators have long regarded patrol not primarily as a preventive strategy but as a means of distributing manpower; thus officers are close to wherever citizens need assistance. These administrators rush their officers away from cooling down citizen disputes so they can get back to routine patrol. The Kansas City experiment provided support for their low expectations of what routine patrol can accomplish and their emphasis on alternative uses of patrol time (Guyot, 1977). The lack of precision in specifying the experimental treatment was the weakest part of the experiment. Richard C. Larson questioned the magnitude of the difference in patrol presence in the different beats in a recent exchange in this journal (Larson. 1975; Pate, Kelling. and Brown, 1975). If the differences in patrol coverage were trivial, then of course the findings would be trivial. Larson applied his model of frequency of patrol passings to demonstrate, among other

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points, that during peak activity periods, such as summer evenings, police mileage driven through reactive beats was probably as high as in control beats. The authors defended the study well. explaining that police presence during a year’s study was not greatly influenced by mileage driven on summer nights. They admitted that they had no accurate measures of police presence or of attention to police presence. The levels of variation were not saturation or nothing, but were within the range that a department could allocate as it made flexible use of its personnel. The methods that give validity to the findings include the strict observance of boundaries-both geographical and between subgroups within the organization. During the running of the experiment, all officers consistently observed the basic boundary separating the South Patrol Division from the rest of the patrol force. Officers from the other two patrol divisions never took calls in the fifteen beat area. The boundaries that were most difficult to observe were around the five reactive beats. Initially officers violated those boundaries to enter the reactive beats when they were not responding to a call for service. After a month. the experiment had to be halted. The department started the experiment all over again after holding new training sessions and issuing new guidelines. The analysis of the data was conducted with the same care for the observation of boundaries as it was in the running of the experiment. The population was divided geographiand proactive beats. The researchers cally into subgroups living in the reactive, control, interviewed a random survey of twelve hundred households in September 1972 before the experiment began, and a year later made a repeat survey of half of those interviewed plus six hundred other households. This splitting of the sample into subgroups of repeated and nonrepeated segments enabled the researchers to discount testing as a threat to internal validity. In the victimization survey, respondents reported whether any member of their household had been the victim of these specific crimes: robberies and attempted robberies, common assault, aggravated assault, rape and attempted rape, other sex crimes. residential burglary and attempted burglary, auto theft, larcenies of auto accessories and from autos, and vandalism. There was no change in the amount of any crime that could be attributed to the difference in the level of patrol. The survey also found no change in citizen attitudes as a result of the difference in patrol strategies: no difference in their fear of being victimized, in self-protection their view of police fairness, or their overall measures, their view of officers’ reputations, satisfaction with police service. Even more precision in the observance of boundaries occurred in the analysis of departmental records on reported crime and arrests. Analysis of each beat in comparison to the matched members of its set of three reiterated the findings that the level of patrol made no difference. The study recognized the possibility of spillover (that crime in one beat might be affected by the patrol level on adjacent beats) and so provided considerable data on intercorrelations among adjoining beats. A thoughful critique by the Social Science Research Council-Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (SSRC-LEAA) workshop on criminal justice statistics (1975) suggested that future experiments redesign the geographical pattern and extend the time as a cross-over design to control for interaction effects across boundaries. The Kansas City study applied subgroup analysis to individual police officers in two complementary ways-on the basis of where the incident occurred and on the basis of the officer’s assignment. If dispatchers had always sent officers to calls from their own beats, these two definitions would have coincided, but forty percent of the time dispatchers sent officers on calls out of their beats. In response to Larson’s queries on dispatching procedures and on whether beats or officers had been used for subgroup analysis, the authors of the report showed that they had made appropriate analysis based on both officers and beats. The authors hypothesized that “reactive” officers who could not enter their beats at will, might inflict their

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frustrations on citizens. Analysis of 997 incidents showed no difference in the handling of incidents by the different types of officers. The hypothesis that when any officers entered a proactive beat they would be more aggressive in their citizen encounters was also tested. For 330 encounters, questionnaires were administered to police officers, citizens, and observers. There was no significant difference between these subgroups, either. Attempting, in effect, to prove the null hypothesis can be deceptively easy since a careless researcher will readily fall into Type 11 error. All the imprecisions of measurement will give the illusion of statistical independence; so will the weakness of treatment. As precautions. the Kansas City study took no short cuts, but in a sound experimental design carefully executed and arduously analyzed, the researchers found no disproof of the null hypothesis. The experiment and its findings have great importance for police work. The fact that the experiment ran successfully for a year shows that it is possible to make systematic inquiry into the effectiveness of police methods. The old argument that “you can’t experiment with people’s lives” no longer prohibits careful inquiry. The findings, that manpower can be redeployed without the depleted regions suffering from the lack of coverage, should free officers from their routine commitment to patrol and give them the time to engage in a variety of more effective techniques of prevention, apprehension, and service.

THE ORGANIZATION

AND ITS ENVIRONMENT

The third principle of organizational analysis, understanding the organizational environment of police departments, is a demanding one. James Q. Wilson observed this principle in explaining how the night watchman and service styles of policing are appropriate to different types of communities with different political systems. However, most studies of police departments omit mentioning the political, criminal justice. or social agencies that interact with them. How many articles on police personnel practices omit the police union and the civil service commission? Which studies of criminal investigation study relationships ‘among departmental detectives, state police investigators, the F. B. I., other federal agents, and the criminalistics laboratories? And then there are studies of police handling of juveniles that ignore the family court. Has anyone seen a study of preventive patrol that considered the effect of private police? Thus, depending upon the problem under study, different organizations or other elements in a police department’s environment must be examined to understand police performance. A decision-making approach is appropriate when the researcher is concerned with policy formation. Thus a police department is viewed as one among many agencies competing for scarce resources and as one influenced by many authoritative decisionmaking bodies (Guyot, 1976). An industry approach, examining the organizational arrangements for the production of services, is appropriate for studying performance. The last two studies to be discussed scrutinized police departments in the context of their organizational environments-one concerned with power and the other with services provided. Power-who wins-is the basis on which Ruchelman (1974) analyzed the relationship of police to the other organizations in three cities: New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. His guiding question was: Who successfully initiates and vetoes the proposals that structure police involvement and accessibility to other jurisdictions? Ruchelman looked at the battles waged between 1966 and 1969 over three issue areas: civilian review and accountability, law and order, and community relations. He found that the major actors were the mayor, the commissioner. the department, and the police association. with a variety of other organizations figuring in various conflicts. As he tallied the score of who won he demonstrated that the

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police politics of each city followed its own consistent pattern across the three issue areas. In New York he found a war waged by legal suits, referenda, and lobbying in which power was so divided among the principal actors that nobody won. In Philadelphia, the mayor supported the commissioner on every issue and the commissioner did what the police association wanted. In Chicago, the mayor was ascendent, taking the initiative, setting the tone. The mayor even stacked blue-ribbon inquiry commissions to protect the police from the attack of reformers. Ruchelman’s approach regarded issues as struggles in which competing individuals and organizations attempt to maintain or advance their power. Ruchelman’s basically sound method could be strengthened in three respects to produce more profound insights. First, he weighted all 166 issues equally, thus inviting the risk that numerous trivial issues would outweigh the few weighty ones. For instance. Ruchelman tabulated the Rand research studies as issues of police accountability and thus gave them more weight than the single titanic struggle over the civilian review board. The most appropriate judges of the importance of political issues are the participants since they expend their resources in the contests. This is the root of Ruchelman’s problem, for he lacked access to the decision makers, and consequently worked from the public record alone. Access to organizational perspectives is essential to establishing the importance of issues, the more so in police work where so little policy discussion takes place in public. Second, Ruchelman had no clear definition of his category “the officers/department” as one of the political actors. Since both the commissioner and the police association claimed to this category appears to be a residual one, not a speak on behalf of the department, participating one in the policy process. Third, and most important of all, one wishes that Ruchelman had discussed the significance of his results. What are the differences in the quality of police service that results from these three different patterns of power? We need theories that relate political dynamics to the direction of change in police service. These criticisms aside, Ruchelman has taken our understanding of police politics a step forward. Elinor Ostrom led a team that has developed a profound and systematic method for understanding the relationships among police agencies. The highly charged policy question that prompted their research was whether small departments should be eliminated as duplicative and inefficient. To answer this question, Ostrom, Parks, and Whitaker (1974, 1976, 1977) developed an industry approach to police service to pinpoint which agencies provide which services to which jurisdictions. They covered a randomly selected sample of eighty of the two hundred standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs) that have populations in the range of 50,000 to 1.5 million and do not cross state lines. This careful descriptive study precisely defines the diversity of interorganizational arrangements by which police services are provided and lays both a theoretical foundation and a rich data base. The researchers constructed a service matrix covering each SMSA for each direct service and traffic control) and then for each intermediary service (patrol, criminal investigation, (training, dispatching, crime laboratory work, and detention). The systematic description for patrol draws attention to commonly ignored producers, such as military police, campus police, and park police, that in some SMSAs contributed more than one-third of the officers on the street. Where more than one agency provided patrol for a jurisdiction, alternation by time or type of clientele was common and duplication was rare. Another striking finding was that the larger the municipal agency, the fewer officers on patrol each evening per unit of population. The median varied systematically from 6.6 per 10,000 population for the smallest departments to 3.3 for the largest. The matrix analysis yielded precise measurements for each SMSA and for each service in terms of eight relational characteristics: the domination by a single producer. fragmentation

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into many jurisdictions, multiplicity of agencies providing the same service, independence of a jurisdiction having its own producer, autonomy (relying only upon its own producer), and the duplication, coordination, and alternation of services from agencies to jurisdictions. These variables summarized a great diversity in the patterns of police service-across size of SMSA, geographic region, and type of service. Here is organizational analysis at a highly sophisticated level-an exploration yielding precise descriptions of the complex relationships among agencies that make up the public service industry of policing. In the second phase of the research project, the Ostrom team will bring together these variables on industry structure with background data on jurisdictions (legal structural variables and collective measures such as retail sales and victimization rates), inputs such as manpower and expenditures, and performance measures. Their results will explicate far more than the initial question of whether small police departments are inefficient. Shortly the team will make their data available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. When researchers begin to use these data and the approach that created them, studies of police work will be greatly enhanced.

WHY HAS ORGANIZATION

BEEN IGNORED?

The positive notes sung in praise of the studies by Ostrom, Rubinstein, Ruchelman, and the Police Foundation are but a thin melodic line above the droning bass of numerous studies that neglect organizational realities. How many studies have we read that committed the following errors? 1. Questionnaires were administered to officers from several departments who assembled temporarily in some training session or college classroom. Analysis proceeded without controlling for the different departments. 2. Attitudes of officers were correlated with individual attributes (such as education and race) without consideration of tenure, assignment, or other relevant characteristics of subgroup membership. 3. Police department performance was evaluated without regard to the adequacy of the other agencies in the local criminal justice system or to the functioning of social service agencies. The first two errors, dissolution of organizational unity in aggregate totals and failure to perform subgroup analysis, are relatively simple to correct, and yet are widespread. A survey of articles on police work published in two leading criminal justice journals reveals in table 1 a limited regard for organizational principles. The few articles that observe none of the principles discuss police work in global generalities, as though it were somehow the same for whatever department, for whatever ranks and specialists, and for whatever organizational environment. Most studies observe organizational integrity (some by default since the subject was one department). Only one article repeats the mistake of analyzing subgroups without first considering organizational integrity. Half the studies failed to make any subgroup analysis, thus perpetuating the stereotype that all cops are alike, interchangeable cogs in impersonal machines. Respect for these first two principles appears to be essential for understanding any facet of police work. Disregard for the organizational environment, committed by two-thirds of the studies, can be corrected only by a total overhaul of the research designs. For a few cases of focused

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DOROTHY GUYOT TABLE 1 ARTICLES

ON POLICE WORK USING ORGANIZATIONAL

PRINCIPLES

(1973-75)

Journal of Criminal Justice

Criminology

2

3

4

5

3

0

I and II

2

6

I and III (Environment)

7

4

ALL

1

1

14

20

Principles Observed

None I (Organizational II (Subgroup

integrity

analysis only)

Total

only)

research within a single department, such as the Kansas City patrol experiment, it is not crucial to measure the department’s organizational environment. Unfortunately, most of the studies published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Criminology suffered from their neglect of the organizational environment. Finally, only three of the thirty-four studies employed all three organizational principles. A number of speculations come to mind that may explain this poor showing. For one. organizational records facilitate information retrieval on the individual characteristics of members but make arduous the tracing of changing subgroup membership. However, let us not place the blame on the objects of study, but rather on the researchers. With Marshall McLuhan we might consider the culture of researchers as linear, leading them to correlational analysis rather than to a search for patterns in multidimensional space. Alternatively we could look to their disciplinary backgrounds as orienting them toward individuals as the unit of analysis (without controlling for contextual effects of organization membership), and away from organizations as the unit of analysis. Can we doubt that a psychologist is more likely than a public administration specialist to ignore subgroup membership? Sociology and political science. disciplines that have contributed most researchers to the police field, have made more spectacular progress in aggregating data with individuals as the unit of analysis than in examining organizational patterns. The mindless use of computers may contribute substantially to the problem. The unthinking researcher writes “ALL” on the statistics control card and then hunts for meaning among the proliferation of test results. Since little effort is needed to command a computer, the temptation is to expend little effort in selecting the right commands. Here we take a page from the ethnolinguists who hypothesize that the structure of language differentially facilitates or impedes the expression of particular concepts. Software packages commonly used by social scientists, Data Text, Bio-Med, and OSIRIS II, facilitate correlation analysis and make relatively

Police Departments

Under

Social Science

117

Scrutiny

It may be that the ease of performing difficult the search for patterned relationships, cross tabulations with a computer satisfies many a researcher, who, if forced to perform the computations manually, would carefully consider whether simple contingency tables would provide the answers to the research questions. A point of interest is that every study reviewed here that went astray did so with the aid of a computer. Eventually software packages will evolve that incorporate more programs for pattern analysis-hierarchical modeling, canonical correlation. smallest space analysis. SPSS, as a relative newcomer among statistical packages, already provides some techniques for handling patterned relationships. However, the researcher on police work must not complacently await the day when organizational analysis will be easy. The reasons for concern over the neglect of organizational perspectives are theoretical and prgamatic. To the extent that we can explain a wider range of phenomena through parsimonious use of principles, we can enjoy the aesthetic satisfaction of scientists. To the extent that we draw on the existing body of knowledge created by the fields of public administration and business management, we can provide insight to the tasks of improving police performance. Police administration is emerging from long isolation and will improve in the future as it becomes more informed by the findings generated through the organizational approach. There is immediate and compelling need for social scientists to scrutinize their research designs to ensure that due heed has been given to organizational facets of police work. Then our research will become more realistically based and more useful to police managers who are reorienting their departments in the service of citizens.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work Rutgers School

has benefitted substantially from the collegial criticisms of Richard Sparks, of Criminal Justice, and Ken Moran, John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

FOOTNOTE The term organization as used in this article refers to formal organizations and is more restrictive than the term social organization, which refers to patterned relationships. A clear instance of a network of relationships that is organized but not an organization, is a ring of car thieves that breaks up when the leader is no longer present.

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