Police Organizations Today

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the United States has over 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, which employ 765,000 sworn officers and another 368,000 non-sworn civilian personnel.  Police leaders must manage these employees as well as address their organizational goals, which typically include reducing crime and building relationships with the community.

Many of us think of big city agencies when we think of police organizations - agencies that are "intentionally structured for the purpose of achieving one or more goals" (Giblin, 2017, p. 4).  While the bulk of police officers work at larger departments, it is important to remember the variation among departments.  In fact, 49% of state and local policing agencies have 10 or fewer full-time officers.  We must keep in mind that policing is predominantly rural and small-town, with several large agencies in big cities (Reaves, 2014).

Organizations include three components:

1. People: individuals or groups who pursue a collective purpose; 
2. Structure: divide and coordinate work; and 
3. Durability: operate over time (Giblin, 2017).

Despite the variation among policing agencies, there is similarity in that they all share these three components.

Macro v. Micro Study of Organizations

At the macro-level, the study of organizations (e.g., structure, practice) is called organizational theory.  For example, Dr. Jennifer Gibbs, one of the faculty in Penn State Harrisburg's School of Public Affairs, and an undergraduate Criminal Justice student wrote a manuscript describing the appearance policies of all state policing agencies in the United States.  (The manuscript is under review at a peer-reviewed journal.)  They were interested in the difference among various tattoo policies, ranging from not permitted at all to permitted with some exclusions (such as no face or neck tattoos) to no policy at all.  Here, organizations were compared with one another.  

At the micro-level, the study of individuals within the organization (such as police leaders) is called organizational behavior.  Another research project led by Dr. Gibbs, along with Dr. Ruiz, studied withdrawal of applicants to a large policing agency in the northeastern United States.  In this project, undergraduate and graduate research assistants called applicants who withdrew within the last seven testing cycles to ask why they withdrew their application, among other questions.  Here, individual applicants were grouped and then compared with one another.

References

Giblin, M. J. (2017).  Leadership and management in police organizations.  Los Angeles: Sage.

Reaves, B. (2011). Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2008.  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.  Available at https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csllea08.pdf