BRING BACK QUALITATIVE POLICING
Quid pro Quo IF YOU DOUBT THIS, realize that there are a number of police agencies in the United States that operate on a “performancebased” budget. This is basically a “quid pro quo” financial arrangement where whoever holds the purse strings for a law enforcement agency—whether it is a city council, a county commission, or a state legislature—has a list of performance expectations (“numbers”) correlated to budgetary allocations. Come budget consideration time, the agency is graded (“budgeted”) largely based upon performance in comparison with this list. If the agency meets these activity expectations, there is generally no problem with the budget as long as it is fiscally viable. If they do not meet these numerical expectations, the executive managers of the agency begin “the dance.” The “dance” is a jerky ballet of excuses, explanations, and the placing of blame and “accountability” for failure. Generally, like all things in this type of ineffective management design, the accountability does not stop with an executive. It rolls downhill and woe to those in its path. Everyone becomes a tin siding salesman, trying to convince corporate that things may not look good right now, but a big sale is just over the horizon. “Expectations” and “performance” in this context are comprised of numbers. Numbers of arrests, numbers of citations, numbers of crashes, numbers of burglaries, numbers of homicides, numbers of rapes. Numbers. There is very little concern given to the qualitative results of police work, and in my experience generally this topic is not one that is encouraged in these discussions. Gone seem 16 M A Y / J U N E
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to be the days when police agencies were simply budgeted as required because every human society needs effective police agencies and effective police agencies need sufficient operating budgets to serve their communities.
CompStat Rules All MODERN POLICE BUDGETING AND MANAGEMENT has become an exercise in statistical analysis, manipulation of data, CompStat presentations, and control. It is about numbers. In essence, police departments in this kind of setting receive no different treatment in budgeting consideration than the motor vehicle division or state parks. It is not about public safety or what the men and women of the agency actually put on the line for their society. It is about the numbers they produce. But what about street-level police work? What has the dayto-day police officer’s job become because of this? Police work, always an emotionally, physically, and psychologically challenging field of endeavor, has now become inundated with numbers. Numbers mean everything, and they define everything. It could be a simple data sheet showing what an officer “produced” during a tour on a shift, or perhaps it is a complex “points system” designed to evaluate an officer’s “productivity” for a given period. Of course, we avoid the term “quota” at all costs, but we all know there is no functional difference. One just sounds more professional and therefore more palatable to the public. Regardless, you can be certain that there is a minimum threshold of acceptability, a level of activity developed by a mid-level manager that every officer must achieve in order to ensure compliance with a “performance standard” that was also developed by a mid-level manager under pressure from executive levels to keep everyone working and accountable. The common term for this is quota. The sterilized management term has become “performance standards.” In either case, not achieving it results in progressively severe discipline. All of this is bureaucratic wheel spinning at its finest. It is management behind numbers, which is for the inept and the unimaginative. Data-driven performance standards, quotas, progressive discipline, and an overall fear of punishment for lack of performance and output have taken the place of the dynamic and innovative police work that was once the hallmark of American policing. PHOTO: ©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
the value of the employee, the project, the initiative, the effort, and the agency. Law enforcement has become a product. And like all products, it requires significant management. This begs the question, how can one measure a police officer’s work product? Is police work inherently empirical or is it intangible and unable to be neatly quantified? Can a police officer’s activity data or project data be seen as the true measure of effectiveness in our communities? There is a real gray area here and there is probably some combination of approaches that would be more successful. But the reality is that it does not matter because the dogs are out of the gate. Police work is big business now; it is no longer just a simple, honorable, and incredibly dangerous public service. It is quantification. It is data extrapolation. It is analysis and, more frequently, inertia of impact. It is inestimably more complicated, stressful, and time consuming to be a police manager today than even 20 years ago due to the herculean responsibilities of bureaucratic notions of availability, motivation, accountability, morale, and where the buck stops for each. We are much more similar today to bank managers than to combat leaders, more like a department store division director than we are to Capt. Frank Furillo on the 1980’s TV show “Hill Street Blues.” Our success and prowess is dependent on our ability to manage or produce numbers, not on an honest evaluation of our agency’s impact in its community. We have lost our focus on our mission and our calling.
Working the Assembly Line I LIKE TO COMPARE POLICE WORK over the past 15 years to an assembly line, which is what in reality it has become. Each of our officers is required to screw a certain number and type of nut on a certain number of bolts as the contraption passes by. All the officers know that if they do not screw on a certain number of nuts, they will be in trouble. If they cannot keep up with their quotas, they will be disciplined progressively until their jobs may be in jeopardy. So they screw on the nuts as fast and as best they can because that is the job and they are always aware that their bosses are behind them, frowning and counting the nuts as they go. Those officers that consistently screw on more nuts than re-
2013
5/21/13 10:57 AM