Gazette - Latest research in law enforcement

ON THE LEADING EDGE

The following are excerpts from recent research related to justice and law enforcement. To access the full reports, please visit the website links at the bottom of each summary.

The impact of performance measurement frameworks on police organizations: a literature review

by Gavin M. Knight for the New Zealand Police

Over the last three decades, management reform has swept through public sector agencies of western nations, bringing with it private sector practices aimed at improving efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. Police agencies, while initially resistant, have, since the 1990s, been impacted by some of these reforms. Crises of police legitimacy have been the catalysts that triggered many instances of these reforms being introduced.

One of the more significant management reforms adopted by police is the introduction of performance measurement frameworks. However, although these frameworks are intended to support organizational effectiveness, if performance measures are too narrow in scope and focus on external legitimacy, they may actually work against police effectiveness. They may actually be reducing the ability of police senior managers to control their organizations, and may be creating organizational misalignment.

This paper discusses this evidence and offers explanations through the perspectives given by organizational theories. It concludes that performance measurement in police may indeed be able to support improved performance. However, to be effective, performance measures need to be carefully designed, taking the perspectives of front-line staff and middle managers into account.

The literature discussed contains numerous criticisms of existing performance measures used by police. It also provides evidence that “loose coupling” has resulted from performance measurement frameworks that are perceived by middle managers as inimical or irrelevant to the needs of the organization. Loose coupling exists where agents are disconnected from organizational goals. This can be caused by administrative arrangements and by environmental factors such as an organization’s social norms. Loose coupling manifests itself as a gap between formal structures and work practices. Formal rules are often broken and decisions are often not implemented.

There are reasons why police executives would want to measure performance. Performance measurement frameworks demonstrate accountability. If properly designed, they may also alert police managers to emerging issues with the effectiveness of business processes that, if untended, may turn into crises of legitimacy.

It follows that better measures are required if loose coupling is to be reduced and organizational effectiveness improved. Developing such better measures, however, may not be straightforward. Whereas performance measures can and do drive behaviour, it is difficult to come up with measures that are useful and avoid unintended adverse behaviours.

To access the full report, please visit:
www.police.govt.nz/events/2008/research-symposium/programme.html

---

An uncertain future: law enforcement, national security and climate change

by Chris Abbott for the Oxford Research Group (U.K.)

Climate change is riding high on both domestic and international political agendas as countries face up to the huge environmental challenges the world now faces. While this attention is welcome, less energy is being focused on the inevitable impact climate change will have on global and domestic security issues and the related policy implications.

Climate change can no longer be considered solely as an environmental issue. The well-documented physical effects of climate change (global average temperature increase, rise in sea levels and altered weather patterns) will have secondary socio-economic impacts (loss of infrastructure, resource scarcity and the mass displacement of peoples). These in turn could produce serious security consequences (civil unrest, intercommunal violence and international instability) that will present new challenges to governments trying to maintain domestic stability.

Those agencies tasked with protecting and sustaining national security will need to adapt to better cope with a changing global environment. Major areas of potential strain for the police and security services are likely to include the following:

Demands for greater border security: Demanding enhanced and more aggressive border security is likely to be the knee-jerk reaction from some politiciansand sections of the general public. While such measures are unlikely to succeed in the long-term, the protection of national and maritime borders and the detention of illegal immigrants is likely to become an increasing priority for the police and coast guard.

Changes in rates and types of crime: It is likely that a rapid rise in immigration will also lead to a change in the rates and types of crime that police forces will have to deal with, as there are clear differences in cultural attitudes towards certain offences, such as impaired driving or knife crime. Related to this will be a greater need for a wide range of interpreters, sensitive community liaison programs and better co-operation between the police and various embassies and consulates.

Policing new legislation: Policy responses to climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions will undoubtedly require new legal mechanisms that will need rigorous policing. For example, enforcing regulations in carbon trading and investigating corruption or fraud in such a system is something that police forces are likely to play a role in. Other potential areas of investigation may include breaches of increasingly strict environmental regulations and fraud within the voluntary greenhouse gas offset markets.

Responding to natural disasters: As already mentioned, flooding, wildfires and extreme weather events will increasingly impact on population centres. One only needs to remember the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2005 to understand the massive demands such events place on the police to both maintain security and provide emergency response and disaster management, including evacuation. Police forces will need to develop far greater planning integration with other local emergency services and federal disaster response agencies, and factor the likely effects of climate change into existing disaster management plans.

To access the full report, please visit:
www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/uncertainfuture.php

---

A national diagnostic on human resources in policing

by the Hay Group for the Police Sector Council (Canada)

In this report, the Hay Group has presented the results of an extensive 10-month (2006–2007) analysis of the current human resource planning and management practices in the policing sector. Specifically, we examined processes and practices in four critical areas of human resource management: recruitment and retention, education and training, succession planning and leadership development, and the application of competencybased human resource management frameworks.

Our key finding is that the human resource planning and management functions in the police sector in Canada have, for the most part, not kept pace with the evolution of the human resource functions in modern organizations. Our assessment has identified opportunities for improvement in each of the four domains that we analyzed. The key recommendation is that policing should start behaving like a co-ordinated sector rather than a coalition of separate employers.

In the domain of recruitment and retention, we recommend a nationwide campaign promoting policing as a career. Police organizations should pool resources and compete against other employment sectors rather than develop their own advertisement campaigns and compete with each other.

In the education and training domain, our key discovery was that while the sector does invest heavily in this area, most of that investment is required just to stand still, in the form of training that is required in order to maintain existing skills and certifications. This is necessary and unavoidable, but it diminishes the opportunity to undertake real employee development.

In the domain of succession planning and leadership development, we found the police sector to be particularly ineffective. This is where the fragmented structure of policing has the greatest impact. Given that more than half of the police organizations in Canada have fewer than 25 employees, they are unlikely to pay attention to succession planning and leadership development. But the leadership demands in small, municipal police organizations are diverse and can be as demanding as many second- or third-level leadership roles in large, urban police organizations.

Many of our recommendations are offered within the context of a competencybased approach to human resources management. Competency-based approaches represent best practices in the private sector, the public and the police sector, with some two-thirds of police organizations currently using these approaches within at least some of their human resource processes.

To access the full report, please visit:
www.policecouncil.ca/pages/publicationHRDiag.html