This paper examines the relationship between police policy effectiveness and organizational effectiveness in law enforcement. It introduces a framework distinguishing between reflexive goals (internal organizational survival) and transitive goals (environmental impact on the community). Using Langworthy's (1989) evaluation of a police fencing sting operation as a case study, the paper argues that a policy can appear organizationally successful while failing to achieve broader public safety outcomes. The auto theft sting recovered stolen property but resulted in higher theft rates, potential damage to public trust, and risks of increased organized crime activity — illustrating how departments must carefully weigh both dimensions before implementing crime-control strategies.
Police policy effectiveness and organizational effectiveness are closely tied together. Departments frequently implement policies designed to control and prevent crime, but also to ensure the continued survival of the organization, including its administration and support elements. This organizational behavior is not always a detriment to the department or its policing goals, but it can be. Departments must continually evaluate their organizational goals and ensure those goals support the broader transitive goals — that is, the environmental impact of a given situation or policy.
For example, if a directed patrol system increases crime prevention and utilizes officers more effectively, it is a positive system both transitively and reflexively. However, many systems actually serve the organization internally rather than the community they are intended to benefit. Thus, a policy can be effective while an organization remains ineffective, or vice versa. Understanding this distinction is essential to evaluating whether a policing strategy truly succeeds.
In Langworthy's (1989) study, an auto theft sting operation was found to be an ineffective police strategy because it did not support the transitive goals of the organization, and it was costly as well. There were actually more cars stolen during the sting operation than during the same time frame the previous year. While a significant amount of stolen property was recovered, the public's perception of the police department and its ethics may have been damaged by the operation. As the study notes, such strategies can also lead to more organized crime activity, retaliatory violence, and even overzealous policing (Langworthy, 1989, p. 43).
The sting operation may have advanced the organization's internal goals of solving more crimes and recovering stolen vehicles, but it ultimately backfired. It cost more to carry out than the value of the vehicles recovered, and the department suffered a decline in public trust as a result. The organization failed to weigh the full disadvantages of the policy before implementation — a failure that carried consequences in both perception and function. Law enforcement agencies must therefore assess both the internal and community-level impacts of a strategy before committing to it.
This case illustrates that organizational and policy effectiveness must be evaluated together. A strategy that appears to serve departmental goals on paper may, in practice, undermine public trust, increase criminal activity, and drain department resources. Crime prevention policy must be measured not only by what it recovers or resolves internally, but by what it costs the community it is designed to serve. The organization did not weigh the disadvantages of the policy, and so it was a bad policy decision that cost the organization in the end, in both perception and function.
Langworthy, R. H. (1989). Do stings control crime? An evaluation of a police fencing operation. Justice Quarterly, 6(1), 27–45.
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