2. 1200 WORD Min. at least 3 scholarly sources due 1/16

 The topics in Unit 3 were the police executive and functions of police management.  For your Unit 3 Complete section assignment, write an essay (minimum of 1,200 words and at least three scholarly sources) in which you address the questions below.  Your essay should also incorporate both the READ and ATTEND sections of Unit 3 and you MUST cite your sources in APA format.

• List the six basic police management functions discussed in this week’s assignment and describe the purpose of each of these functions.
• Identify and explain the two basic roles of the law enforcement executive.
• Read Case Study 4, “Gaining Outside Commitment in Lowell, Massachusetts” and Case Study 5, “Leading Change in Riverside California.” Keeping the two basic roles in mind, thoroughly explain the internal and external roles displayed by both chiefs. Be sure to include successes and/or failures in your explanation.
• Identify and explain the four executive styles.  For the chiefs in the two studies, which of the four styles would you use to describe each of them and why.

goodon time

Case 4: Gaining Outside Commitment in Lowell, Massachusetts

Lowell, Massachusetts, is an old manufacturing city with a population of about

10

0,000 located 34 miles north of Boston. In the 1990s it was pushed from the outside by state and federal policy, which influenced the department through the grants it began to need when the city’s largely industrial economy faltered; it was also pushed by local government itself, which pressured all Lowell agencies to work in a more neighborhood-oriented fashion. But, most importantly, the LPD was driven from the inside by two forces. First, and most visibly, by a talented and articulate chief with a clear vision and effective management style; and second, by many committed staff whose innovations were allowed to prosper (some of these actually emerged well before the department officially tried to “transform itself,” but they were not supported by the previous administration).

Prior to the reforms, the department suffered in the forum of public opinion. Officers themselves remembered that “it was almost like we were just like an occupying army in the city … and there was, I think, very little support for the police department.” A management consultant who guided officers through a strategic planning process (which in part took stock of the department’s current state) reports that even those who tended to glorify the past admitted that the community viewed Lowell police “dismally.”

When LPD Captain Ed Davis was appointed Acting Superintendent, he initiated strategic planning and a variety of internal operational and administrative changes. In addition, he focused considerable attention on building a coalition of support in the outside world. Most simply, Davis began to open up the department’s decision making to outside eyes. He explains that he

opened the doors up for the police department for the first time, and I talked frankly about staffing issues, and I talked frankly about budget issues. I talked frankly about the internal affairs function which is always a matter of great concern to the community groups.

But Davis became increasingly uneasy with the essentially reactive stance that this type of interaction with the community implied. In particular, following the very successful implementation of a new precinct (Centralville), practically every neighborhood in Lowell demanded something similar. Davis summarizes the feeling with an aphorism: “There’s a saying in community policing, ‘You can teach the bear to dance, but you can’t necessarily tell it when to stop.’ That was what happened with these community groups.” For Davis, the problem was that the department lost any control over the agenda: the dialogue with the community focused exclusively on issues that the groups themselves raised. “We were always reactive. We were always going to a community group to answer for a particular injustice or a particular problem that was observed by that group.”

In some cases, Davis tried to win back partial control of the agenda not by disengaging from the community-initiated dialogue, but by engaging it proactively. One often-told story in this vein concerns the siting of the Highlands precinct, which became a focus of conflict between the department and a nearby neighborhood group. The problem was simple: the LPD wanted to locate the precinct in the largely Cambodian Lower Highlands neighborhood, and the local Boy’s Club had offered the department space in a location that lay at the center of many of the area’s problems. But the community group, representing the predominantly white Cupples Square neighborhood, argued that the new precinct should be located in their neighborhood. Well-connected in local politics, the group brought their concerns to a number of city councilors, and Davis began to feel pressure to change his mind about the location of the site.

Davis believed he was in the right in this case: “This was clearly just a small segment of the community,” he maintains, “and [implying] it wasn’t the Cambodian people who really needed the services. [But] That’s where people were actually dying.” Davis turned to consultant Linda Hart for advice. So she said:

Okay, well, it sounds to me like you have to put together a really good presentation that examines that data. So we’ll go out and we’ll take photos of the two locations and try to sell it to the group. And in addition to that, I think that you have to bring a different constituency to the meeting.

So she went out and actively recruited the Cambodian community to appear at this meeting.

So here you have this group of two hundred or so white lower-middle-class individuals who are pretty politically savvy. And all of a sudden, 50 or 100 Cambodian people come in and sit down at the meeting. They don’t know what to do. The people at the meeting didn’t know how to handle this. And then we walked in and we put on a really good presentation with data and photos of what the two locations looked like.

Going into the meeting, Davis had taken a hand vote to gauge support for the two sites, and he estimates that three-quarters of those voting preferred the Cupples Square location. But after the presentation—when the department presented crime statistics and other basic information about the two areas—sentiment had switched, and the group overwhelmingly voted to go with the Boy’s Club site. City Manager Richard Johnson, who attended the meeting with Davis, still remembers the event with astonishment:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a neighborhood group where you expect to go in and get the shit kicked out of you and people throwing rocks at you—and he went in there with such a positive approach, with statistics, and facts and figures, that the people basically said, “He’s our expert. He’s the leader of this thing. We’ve got to give him the support.” And they did. And that doesn’t happen often, when people have a predetermined position. And they definitely had a predetermined position going in, no question about it.

With his growing frustration over losing control of the agenda, Davis took the proactive approach even further by sponsoring the department’s own massive community meeting, which focused on Lowell’s declining downtown. He remembers,

I had a meeting that was sponsored by the police department. The downtown business district had been decimated by businesses leaving because of the crime problem. And I invited everybody in the city that was left—I sent police officers in uniform with invitations—and I held a meeting at the Sheraton. And I brought the whole Command Staff of the Police Department there and sat them in front of all the business people in the downtown area. And I said to them, “Look, we’re going to make a difference here. If you have a problem here, you call this person. This is Captain so and so, this is Lieutenant so and so, they’re in charge of this, they’re in charge of that. We’re going to have a sheet of paper before you leave that will show you how your police department works.”

The meeting was a huge success, completely filling the ballroom at Lowell’s Sheraton hotel. As Davis sees it, the event provided a dual opportunity: “I indicated not only to the people in the city, but to the command staff, that things were going to be a little different.” Davis has maintained a strong relationship with the downtown business community ever since.

Davis attended to the outside world in many other ways. He worked closely with city government throughout this period, and also sought advice and support from Senator Paul Tsongas (whose permanent residence was in Lowell) on occasion. (For example, Tsongas helped Davis come up with a mission statement for the department, which was to create “the safest city of its size in the nation.”) Davis worked closely with many other elements of the community as well, notably the schools department and the local university. Davis went to great lengths to develop a supporting coalition not only inside the LPD, but also outside of it.

The community response to the LPD’s new openness was overwhelming. In the department’s eyes; one of the most visible indicators of this was a successful fundraising drive led by a local businessman to raise some $200,000 to buy the department’s mobile precinct. But more objective citizen surveys reveal this support as well: for example, the highest proportion of residents who thought that the LPD was providing protection “not well” or “not well at all” in three surveyed neighborhoods was only 18 percent.

Some concerns continued to exist, to be sure. Lee Winkelman, the organizing director for Coalition for a Better Acre (a nationally known community development corporation that focuses its attention on Lowell’s Acre neighborhood), believed that dispatchers lack sufficient language skills, and that precinct personnel change too often (possibly as a result of the LPD’s bid system, which lets officers switch jobs every 18 months if they so desire). But, in the end, the LPD won over even Winkelman, a committed activist who has always believed that crime ultimately stems from poverty, not inadequate policing: “It’s the best in any place I’ve worked. … I often joke around that if the other community organizers heard me saying such good things about the police, I’d lose my community organizer’s license.” He points particularly to the department’s active hiring of Cambodian and Latino officers, the very visible impact the LPD had on street drug dealing in the Acre, and the department’s openness—particularly Chief Davis’s—to community concerns.

Source: Adapted from David Thacher. n.d. “National COPS Evaluation: Organizational Change Case Study—Lowell, Massachusetts.” Online at: 

www.ncjrs.gov/nij/cops_casestudy/lowell4.html

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.The text emphasizes in 

Chapter 7

 that police executives have internal and external roles. What do you think of the approach that Chief Davis of Lowell took toward his external role? What external constituencies did he seem most concerned about? Why?

2.One of the reasons that Chief Davis worked so hard to cultivate external groups was so that they could then help him exert pressure within the police department to make changes. Why would he use a change strategy like this? This seems like it might be the opposite of the “inside-out” strategy discussed in the text in 

Chapter 10

. In any particular situation, how would you decide whether to use an inside-out strategy or an outside-in strategy?

3.A tenet of community policing is that police departments should be responsive to community needs and priorities. Chief Davis, though, went to great lengths to get one community to change its views about where to locate a new police station. Why did he do this? Was he right to do it? Did it violate the spirit of community policing?

4.Compare Chief Davis’s management and leadership styles to those discussed in 

Chapters 9

 and 10. Which styles and techniques did he most exemplify? In your opinion, how well did his style fit the needs of the situation in the Lowell Police Department at the time?

5.What were the strengths and weaknesses of the approach that Chief Davis used to improve the Lowell Police Department?

Case 5: Leading Change in Riverside, California

Riverside, California, is a city of 250,000 residents at the heart of California’s Inland Empire, an agricultural powerhouse that lies to the east of Los Angeles. As Riverside has matured and its agricultural industry has lost the power to carry the local economy entirely, the city has shown some characteristic signs of age and growth, such as a declining downtown and rising crime rates.

In the 1990s, the Riverside Police Department faced some significant challenges, including a lukewarm reputation in the city’s minority communities, a series of lawsuits brought by Riverside citizens, and internal divisions over its leadership and how to handle the agency’s growth, which had made traditionally informal management practices increasingly problematic. Ken Fortier, the chief of police appointed to meet these challenges, was able to revamp the RPD’s administration, helping to install modern systems for everything from budgeting to the serving of search warrants, and he was able to lay the foundations for community policing in the city by spearheading a system of area commands charged with solving community problems. On the other hand, Fortier’s leadership provoked great resistance in Riverside, and many of his reforms were embroiled in turmoil until his departure.

One problem that preceded Chief Fortier was a lack of communication between city government and the RPD. The two groups often didn’t get together on many issues in the first place, and city hall apparently became increasingly uncomfortable with the way police were making decisions on their own. The RPD’s relationship to the community was similar, in the sense that the department had a relatively good public image with most of the community, but little direct dialogue outside of individual calls for service and newspaper reports on specific crimes.

On the other hand, some groups of Riverside residents apparently had serious concerns about their police department: most notably, while only 25 percent of whites rated the RPD’s performance as “only fair” or “poor” in the survey, 54 percent of blacks did so. Also, there was clearly tension between police and at least a significant minority of Latinos. For their part, many police felt threatened by increasingly violent gangs, and they denied the charges of both harassment and under-enforcement. “Like many police departments,” one RPD veteran explained, “our attitude pretty much was like ‘We’re the police, and we go to school for this and train, and we’re the experts in this area.’”

Basic mechanisms for control and direction-setting were underdeveloped in the RPD—at least that was the conclusion of a management audit commissioned by Riverside’s city manager. The audit painted a picture of an organization strong on basic operations but with weak administrative systems. Many of these administrative deficiencies may have been related to the department’s long-established philosophy of management, which many people inside and outside the department referred to as “high trust, low control.” The basic idea was apparently that police should be treated as independent professionals who did not need much direct supervision and structure in their work, whether directly from managers or indirectly from the administrative systems they created and monitored. It was not, of course, that basic organizational checks were not in place: For example, sergeants and lieutenants were expected to make sure that patrol officers followed established procedures, like those that governed pursuits. But, in critical areas—notably discipline and the search warrant process—many RPD veterans report that management took a hands-off approach, preferring to leave matters to officers and detectives themselves with an appeal to their sense of professional integrity.

As Chief Fortier remembers his first days in office, he took over the RPD with a broad mandate for change that focused on implementing community policing and carrying out the main recommendations from the audit. The audit was particularly influential in shaping his sense of the RPD’s strategic issues. “I asked for a copy of the report before I was hired and looked it over,” he remembers, “and it was clear to me that there were some managerial problems that needed to be dealt with. It wasn’t really a blueprint necessarily, but it was pretty clear.” In particular, deficiencies like the lack of an effective internal affairs unit and the lack of an organized training effort were red flags to Fortier that some basic managerial issues needed to be addressed.

Several problems would soon emerge. First of all, the infrastructure effort turned out to be deeply problematic for many officers in Riverside, which had an established history of doing things informally and did not necessarily see a need to change. For example, one of Fortier’s first initiatives as chief was an attempt to deal with the informality of the RPD’s labor agreements, but when the department released booklet copies of the new agreement to all employees, it had an effect opposite to what Fortier intended. “We thought this would be popular,” he remembers. This experience, in particular, convinced Fortier that there was a severe division between management and the rank-and-file: “There’d just been years and years of miscommunication and distrust and ineffective management—there’s no other way to put it. It was really us and them.”

The second problem was the somewhat ad hoc nature of the infrastructure effort, emerging as it did by pieces, with the result that some RPD members could not perceive any clear vision guiding the changes that were taking place. Jerry Carroll, who became chief after Fortier, suggests that Fortier’s role as a change agent made it positively inadvisable for him to articulate what he was doing. “I asked the deputy chief one time, ‘I want to see the vision,’” Carroll remembers. “He said, ‘He’s not going to show you the vision’—because the vision was an agenda and the agenda was to come in and change the culture here in this police department.” In any case, the result was that there was little buy-in to the reforms Fortier had in mind. “I don’t think anybody knew what the vision was,” Carroll maintains. “It was not articulated.”

Fortier sought to put together a management team that was committed not just to community policing in particular, but to organizational reform in general. To that end, he sought to quickly promote people to management positions who were capable and committed to reform, and to speed up the retirement of those who were not. Fortier also looked outside the department altogether for people who had some of the qualifications that its own officers lacked. The backlash against this effort was severe—at best department members resented the loss of a rare promotion opportunity, and at worst they took the move as a statement that in Fortier’s eyes, “in-house people weren’t good enough.”

This effort and a parallel one to revise the criteria for promotion to all supervisory and management positions also alienated many RPD members and thereby backfired with respect to the goal of building support for reform. Most simply, while Fortier could fill management positions using new criteria, he could not ensure that the new managers would have the necessary influence over their rank-and-file officers. Indeed, as the criteria for promotion changed, the entire process apparently lost some legitimacy in the eyes of the troops, so that many officers became cynical about how their new superiors had made their ranks.

The basic problem was that promotions themselves did not necessarily breed loyalty in a situation where reform stirred up many other sources of resistance. It was not simply that the face of management was changing: its mandate was changing as well, and in ways that exacerbated growing tensions within the RPD.

These issues, together with several cost-cutting measures (including cutting court-related overtime and reducing the size of the patrol fleet) radicalized the Riverside Police Officers Association (RPOA) and led to an all-out assault on Fortier’s leadership, punctuated by an overwhelming vote of no confidence. Officer complaints grew one-by-one, from the patrol car issue, to the complaint policy, to promotion decisions, to changes to working schedules. Even reforms that did not get implemented, like a proposal to give the chief the power to move detectives back into patrol assignments, added to anti-Fortier sentiment. Finally, some complaints centered not on specific policies but on Fortier’s blunt style of management, his reputation for inflexibility, and on allegations that he played favorites and told inconsistent stories to different audiences.

Fortier’s backers dismissed accusations that he was indifferent to officer opinion, maintaining that the chief had made extraordinary efforts to express his support for the troops and include them in decision making. Fortier was, they argued, the first chief in Riverside’s memory to include an RPOA representative in command staff meetings; he made frequent appearances at roll calls and in ride-alongs; and he repeatedly made statements to the press about the quality of Riverside’s police. The chief also paid attention to small details: for example, when a crack showed up in an officer’s 9 mm gun, Fortier ordered new guns for the entire department and asked officers what type they wanted. Finally, new policy decisions were almost always justified in dispatches sent to the entire patrol force, so that officers would understand why changes were being made.

But these strategies for building support never paid off inside the department. Some argue that by the time Fortier entered his second year in Riverside, it was already too late, for the conflict between management and the officers had become personal. At that time, a veteran narcotics detective named Jack Palm took over the RPOA presidency and began waging an intense battle to remove Fortier from office. None of this turmoil, Fortier insists, had any direct bearing on his decision to retire after five years as chief, a decision that he says was motivated by growing medical problems. But the former chief admits that the constant stress of the job—as well as the serious personal harassment he and his wife began facing—contributed to those medical problems.

Source: Adapted from David Thacher. n.d. “National COPS Evaluation: Organizational Change Case Study—Riverside, California.” Online at: 

www.ncjrs.gov/nij/cops_casestudy/riversid.html

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.This case study describes a four-year effort by a new chief, brought in from the outside, to implement change in the Riverside Police Department. How successful was the effort? Why wasn’t it more successful? What would you have done differently, if anything?

2.Clearly, the Riverside Police Department had some labor/management issues. Why do labor and management sometimes get into conflict in police departments? What could Chief Fortier have done to try to reduce the labor/management conflict in Riverside?

3.Analyze the case from the standpoint of leadership and management styles. Which styles of leadership and management did Chief Fortier represent, compared to the styles that had preceded him in Riverside. Was his approach the most effective one? Why or why not?

4.Analyze the case in terms of the approaches to organization development discussed in 

Chapter 9

 and the contemporary management models presented in 

Chapter 15

. Which of these approaches did Chief Fortier rely on the most? If you were appointed police chief in Riverside following Chief Fortier’s retirement, which methods and models would you implement to complete the process of organizational change in the department?