quired get plaques and are recognized as exceptional employees and become the “example” for the others. Those that do not meet expectations are eventually transferred or even fired. So the majority of officers, watching all of this, settle in for the long haul. They lose their enthusiasm quickly and learn to become anonymous. They learn to do the bare minimum required to keep their jobs and nothing more; doing more generates expectations and doing less generates punishment. So, they just show up and screw nuts on bolts. The kicker is that like workers on an endless assembly line none of these officers have any idea what they are actually building.
All About the Numbers WHAT IS MISSING HERE seems to be any emphasis whatsoever on qualitative efforts or results on productivity and on a fundamental respect for the willingness of these men and women to serve our country in such a dangerous way. Our only concern is activity, and activity for activity’s sake just to produce numbers to put on a data sheet is not policing. It is not leadership. It does not control crime, traffic, or any other law enforcement issue in our communities. It is a stultifying paradigm and it is not working. This is the criminal justice version of outcomebased education. Modern police work is about producing numbers and not about producing results. It is all about activity, as opposed to productivity. Like all ineffective management models, it is defined by demands and expectations of control where none exists. The police business is no longer about the individual police
officer trying to make a difference in his or her community or about real and effective police work, except incidentally as it occurs as a means to an end. It is no longer about the intangible and powerful effect of a good police officer in a struggling community doing good things, presenting a positive example of authority and personal responsibility, or getting out there and creating change. It is about numbers. It is about the appearance of productivity. It is a politicized process, a professionally corrupt model of data and statistical manipulation and ineffectual leadership, and ladies and gentlemen it is failing miserably. One of the most frustrating aspects of this entire paradigm for mid-level police managers—or perhaps any level of police management save executive levels—is the stubborn demand for “leadership.” Executive levels of police agencies that operate under this new paradigm will still clamor for “dynamic leaders” or for “dynamic leadership” in the field. The paramilitary character of law enforcement has always put a premium on the ideal leaders—the combat leaders, the field leaders, the operational leaders that people will follow because they are confident, they have the ability, they have charisma. The problem is there is no room for any kind of dynamic leadership in an empirical and statistically driven endeavor. A truly dynamic leader is smothered there in an environment that is saturated with bureaucracy, statistics, forms, data manipulation, and the slippery notion of “accountability.” What executives in this kind of environment require are pedantic taskmasters. They need managers. Managers will always do the thing right and hold the correct people accountable in the correct way with the correct form and the correct
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