¶ … Police Organizations
This report asks the author of this report to offer ways and methods that police and other law enforcement agencies can use to bring about and implement changes to the organization's policies, practices and habits. Several such methods will be given with an accompanying explanation of why the change would or should work and how exactly that will come about. While change movements and undertakings are similar in all sorts of organizations, change efforts take on a special significance in a public safety-involved agency for quite obvious reasons.
Change Methods
One way that change can be engaged in with private sector employers is to elicit feedback from the customers. While police departments do not have customers in the strictest sense of the word, one can certainly look at the public residing in or around the area the police departments covers as being the customers of the police department, or at least stakeholders. As such, it would behoove police departments to keep an ear to the ground, so to speak, and listen to what the populace wants. Obviously, this will lead to nonsense suggestions like curtailing DUI checkpoints because it portends a police state but other options such police outreach opportunities, areas of the jurisdiction that are being neglected and reports...
It could be used as an extension of the neighborhood watch program as well as a suggestion box for helping the police department run in a more low-cost and efficient way.
Another change method that police departments and law enforcement agencies would engage in is to make sure that the return on investment and the "need" for an item are as justified and proper as they actually are. Upgrading computers that were just upgraded two years ago, for example, would be foolish but doing so for computers running Microsoft Windows XP, a twelve-year-old operating system, would be much easy to explain and justify. Similarly, if the cars in the police fleet are falling apart, then it would make sense to buy new ones but not if the cars could be easily repaired and kept up and/or used for other purposes. In short, no money should be spent unless it's clear that the need exists.
Even though the barrier to proving that is much higher and more entrenched in the public sphere than it is in the private sphere, simply because taxpayer money is involved, it is not terribly hard to justify what should be spent and what should not. If a headquarters building is plenty big enough but needs to…
