DNRC INNOVATIONS, BARRIERS

DRNC Leadership Practicum

Actions to Encourage Innovative Ideas

Major events are always a special concern to law enforcement and a test of its crowd control capabilities (Connors, 2007). Security management covers the entire duration of the events -- before, during and after. Even after the event, security management continues with the clearing up the place, administrative tasks, and debriefing and after-action report. The after-action report critiques all the operations conducted, such as deviations from the event plan and recommendations. Recommendations, in turn, tackle what should be kept and changes that should be made. These recommendations and changes may be innovative ideas from frontline officers on how to upgrade crowd control tactics. Frontline officers are valuable to the organization. They are more numerous than middle managers or frontline supervisors. They are also more knowledgeable about the situation and, at the same time, are the ones in daily contact with all stakeholders. For their valuable role in developing crowd control tactics, they should be strongly encouraged to express their ideas and perceptions (Connors).

This can be done by making them know that their leaders are on their side and by making them see and understand the entire situation or picture of the organization (Connors, 2007). A number of actions can encourage them to be innovative and come up with valuable ideas. Leadership should...

It should be supportive of their seeming mistakes or they will remember not to come up with any in the future. It should establish an explicit policy, which will entice them to be innovative. Leadership should broaden job categories rather than confine them to narrow tasks. Let them learn more jobs or tasks. Leadership should reward them as teams, not as individuals. Downplay their hierarchy. Break the group down into functional units. Disseminate all the job information to everyone. And inform all of them about innovations that have succeeded (Connors).
Overcoming Barriers to New Ideas

There are many issues to introducing change in law enforcement, but they weave around the key areas, namely, identifying the change, communicating it, and resisting it (Lewis & Rogers, 2014). The two types of change are first-order and second-order changes. First-order changes address strategies supporting current status and are non-transformational. Second-order changes, on the other hand, address the culture of the organizational and are transformation. Communicating the change should be suited to the specific groups within the department and the key stakeholders. If communication is not done this way, the change process will fail. And resistance to change often comes from leaders themselves who are supposed to introduce and incorporate the change or new idea into the department. At the same time, they can…