Jon Shane

Performance management in police agencies: a conceptual framework

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to define a systematic management structure that helps police practitioners institutionalize performance management and analysis in more rational‐technical ways.Design/methodology/approach – The design is based on Golds “complete participant” field researcher method.Findings – The findings suggest a performance management model is more rational than the traditional command‐control model and may increase consistency in police management by systematically collecting and reporting on streams of data to measure performance instead of relying on rote compliance.Research limitations/implications – The model is limited because it does not account for important intangible qualities of performance (e.g. attitude, initiative, judgment); in the hands of autocratic managers it can be oppressive and cause more problems than it solves; it may constrain officer discretion; it has not been advanced as a learning instrument; and performance indicators are subject to measurement erro...

Daily work experiences and police performance

This study examined police officers’ perceptions of daily operational and organizational work experiences and their relationship with performance in two large urban police departments in the Midwest and the Middle Atlantic regions (USA). The findings were mixed: (1) organizational work experiences showed a higher mean score than operational work experiences; (2) there was no significant difference between cities on organizational and operational work experiences; and (3) multiple regression models for both organizational and operational work experiences predicted performance. Future research should examine work experiences in smaller and mid-size police agencies, suburban and rural agencies and widen the participant pool to include superior officers and civilian personnel.

Police Employee Disciplinary Matrix: An Emerging Concept

This article explores the concept of a rational sentencing structure for imposing internal police discipline that helps practitioners make more reasoned and consistent decisions when dispensing discipline. The data consists of 360 hr of participant observation of police trials involving sworn police officers and civilian employees in the Newark, New Jersey Police Department. Various agency records provide an understanding of the formal influences surrounding police discipline. The findings suggest a disciplinary sentencing matrix is more rational than the traditional discretionary method, which is largely informal and relies on best estimates. The matrix may increase consistency in disciplinary sentences, which is an important aspect of organizational justice that leaves police employees with a sense of fairness in management’s disciplinary decisions.

Successful and Unsuccessful Pirate Attacks Worldwide: A Situational Analysis

Using concepts drawn from situational crime prevention theory, this study compares successful and unsuccessful pirate attacks (n = 4,638) against ships worldwide and the situational factors that help prevent such attacks. The results show that when a ship’s crew takes proactive self-protective measures that increase the perceived effort (increasing speed, employing evasive maneuvers) and increase the perceived risk (embarking private security, having watchman present, raising alarm, increasing lighting, anti-piracy) of perpetrating an attack, unsuccessful attacks are significantly more likely after controlling for environmental influences. Despite a few common data limitations, the study contributes to the crime prevention literature by analyzing piracy from a micro level instead of a macro level. Future research should examine how the piracy “ecosystem” contributes to the problem and the costs and benefits counter-piracy activities.

Data and Methodology

This research uses a mixed method design to present a deep narrative account of facts that offer context (qualitative), supplemented by statistical data (quantitative) that offer breadth. Mixed methodology was selected for the strength of triangulation to elaborate and clarify the findings and to generate greater understanding about how errors in policing might occur. The source documents for the analysis appear in Table 3.1.

Improving Police Use of Force: A Policy Essay on National Data Collection:

Documenting police use of force has been an issue in the United States since at least 1931. As of July 2016, there is still no standardized national data collection effort, despite a call from several presidential and civil rights commissions to do so. Without accurate and timely national data, a moral panic of sorts unfolds that replaces rational thought and debate necessary to enact public policy. Moreover, without such data, it is virtually impossible to estimate the incidence and prevalence of police use of force, which leaves U.S. law enforcement agencies at a tremendous disadvantage for improving practices. This essay briefly examines the history of calls to improve police practices through collecting national use of force data and then offers a practical solution based on rational-technical theory of organizations with a brief analysis of a new promising, but limited, data set. The essay concludes with a proposed research agenda should national data become available through pending legislation H.R. 306, National Statistics on Deadly Force Transparency Act of 2015.

Background and the Problems Surrounding Confidential Informants

Relying on human intelligence sources in police work when the person is untested takes a syllogistic form: Faith is belief in things that are hoped for, but for which evidence does not exist; untested informants possess no evidence of veracity or reliability; therefore, a police agency that deploys an untested informant operates on faith in the informant’s veracity and reliability. This is a very precarious territory! Problems that arise may be linked to the informant’s integrity, or policy deficiencies that implicate a lack of control over the informant, which eventually fosters an organizational accident. Aside from the implications for criminal trials, misusing confidential informants (CIs) has also been costly for agencies involved in civil litigation arising primarily from Fourth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment violations. Without a documented history of testing the informant’s integrity before the informant is deployed, a police officer risks introducing biased, inaccurate, or perjured information at trial, which contaminates the search for truth and vitiates the judicial process.

Directions for Future Research

Future research should examine other potentially compromising features of confidential informant (CI) management, such as using juveniles, illegal aliens, jailhouse informants, how motivation leads a CI to either turn on their handler or commit other crimes while they are working, the costs and benefits of buying information from a CI, and the relationship between wrongful convictions, personal injury or death, and policy weaknesses involving CIs. Lastly, it would be interesting to compare CIs who have and who have not been subjected to pre-deployment integrity testing to determine if there is a significant qualitative difference in the cases they represent. These areas present a research agenda for issues involving CIs that have implications for legitimacy and American jurisprudence.

Discussion, Policy Implications, Limitations and Directions for Future Research

What can criminal justice learn from a single case study? This study revealed how a person can be misidentified during a police show-up, the failure points during the preliminary investigation that may have facilitated the misidentification and the failure points during the follow-up investigation that may have accelerated the harm (or failed to stop the harm sooner). The study also revealed proof of concept, that the organizational accident framework is well suited for investigating critical police incidents. Approaching accidents through a systems theory of causation can help police managers, supervisors and support staff act with foresight and imagination to identify system failures before they occur leading to a safer work environment. Applying this theory of accidents to police work and replicating the study here can strengthen the theory so that across a range of critical incidents (e.g., use of force, vehicular pursuit, wrongful arrest), patterns of behavior and contributing factors reveal themselves to become predictable and, consequently, generalizable.

Details of the Incident

The incident occurred in July 2007, at approximately 3:00 p.m. in a mid-sized U.S. city. A police officer was on patrol in a marked police car in the City when he was approached by an Hispanic male who informed him that he had just been robbed inside his store. The officer broadcasted over the police radio that three White or Hispanic males were seen running east bound on City streets from the store.