Police departments serve several purposes. These are to protect life and property, prevent crime, detect and arrest offenders, preserve the peace, and enforce the laws. Every function of the agency should be aimed at one or another of these objectives. Deviations are dysfunctional. To achieve these objectives, the agency must compartmentalize itself into the box and function model that typifies the organizational structure. These organizational boxes are created to achieve the prioritized goals.
Functions
Most municipal police agencies basically approach their tasks from a three-pronged perspective:
1. Attack street crime. This means organizing the agency to detect and arrest criminals, and to make it more difficult to commit crimes.
2. Better service. The great majority of police work involves responding to emergencies, accidents, illnesses, and mishaps. The response mechanism involves 911, single-person patrols, prioritization of calls, and other factors that focus on improving the speed and efficiency of the response.
3. Traffic safety. Promoting the safe, speedy flow of traffic requires concentration on engineering, education, and enforcement—the three E’s of traffic policy.
A well-organized police department has recognized its mission, prioritized its approach, and organized itself in the most relevant and cost-effective manner. The result should be an organization that understands its objectives and is moving effectively toward their realization. With the mission defined and the objectives established, the question for the chief must be ”How well are we doing?” This is where inspection comes in.
Management
Despite the complaints of many executives, there seems little doubt that the true problem in government is not money but management. Under the widening pressures of budgetary constraints, police managers have learned how to get more bang for the taxpayer’s buck through inventive cutback management techniques. In a very real sense, the budget crises that attended much of municipal life in the 1970s and 1980s proved a boon to executives who were forced to manage, as opposed to being mere caretakers of, police enterprises.
Management implies making maximum use of the resources available to achieve the organizational aims. The final responsibility for the results lies with the chief. Removed as he or she is from the daily functionings of the agency, how can he or she establish that subordinates adhere to policy faithfully? Tools have to be devised to enable verification that the operating levels are conforming to the program. The size and complexity of the models used to inspect the processes will, of course, depend on the size and complexity of the organization being examined.
Information becomes central to effective functioning. The accuracy of the information is critical to the outcome. Subordinates will be inventive in finding ways to report faithful conformity with procedures.
Control is central to the chief executive’s direction of his or her agency, and it will not be effective without essential pieces of information about the actual performance of the organization’s members.
Inspection can serve as the helm that steers the vessel through uncharted seas. It enables the captain to make the necessary adjustments.
Inspection will not only establish whether there is compliance and conformity but will also reveal needs and deficiencies that need to be addressed, as well as whether programs that are being faithfully implemented actually work. Thus, it is a very broad management strategy that goes beyond mere verification and assessment of stewardship, important as these factors are.
Control
One of the constants of police administration is nasty surprises. How many chiefs and mayors have awakened to such scandals as narcotics evidence missing from police custody, some egregious brutality complaint that clearly reflects loss of control, collections or other corrupt practices that indicate a climate of wide-open practices, or any of a hundred other problems that communicate a sense of total loss of control over a police agency? Inspections will serve to restrict acts of non-, mal-, and misfeasance to the occasional, specific, and individual—as opposed to the tolerated, systemic, and clearly widespread.
Inspection
Inspection is an examination of persons, places, or things intended to establish whether they are contributing to the achievement of organizational objectives. Performance is evaluated, deficiencies discovered, needs are identified, and corrections suggested. It is a method for monitoring and controlling organizational behavior. It may be defined as an auditor verification.
Procedures
Inspection procedures can be reactive or proactive. The former involves after-the-fact inquiries, examinations, or investigations to establish the when, where, why, how, what, and who of an event, action, program, incident, or procedure. The latter involves cover testing of the process, frequently through replicating situations to establish whether abuses really are occurring.
Inspection is primarily aimed at determining the quality of a commander’s stewardship, as opposed to specific inquiries into individual wrongdoing that characterizes the work of internal affairs units (IAUs). It is important that the distinction be understood if organizational confusion is to be avoided. A police officer is accused of police brutality and an investigation is launched. This is typically the work of internal affairs. A command is accused of widespread and systemic use of brutality as an instrument of policy, which is at least tolerated—and perhaps even encour-aged—by the commander. This requires an inspection. An officer is charged with a dishonest act and is investigated by internal affairs. Citizens complain of shakedowns, thefts, or extortions by the police, with the commander doing nothing. This falls within the province of inspections.
A precinct commander is accused of falsifying crime statistics to make his or her unit look good. This would fall within the purview of the IAU, but charges that the data are being fudged widely would be examined by inspections. The distinction centers on whether we are examining a specific, individual act or assessing the pervasiveness of a negative condition.
Inspection then becomes the verifying, auditing, and examining arm of the chief executive. It establishes the degree of compliance, detects deviations from policies, and informs the chief as to the operational realities, as opposed to the upbeat reports he or she is certain to be receiving from those charged with the responsibility for carrying out the chief’s program.
An inspections unit will determine what the agency’s priorities and policies are and then undertake examinations to establish how faithfully they are kept. It will do so through examination of records, the monitoring of performance, the observation of managerial competence, and the verification of findings through such independent means as polling, replications, and the use of undercover operatives.
Stewardship
Since the function centers on the commander’s stewardship, and since modern theories emphasize the importance of managerial autonomy, in order to allow the development of the individual’s talent, it becomes more important than ever that a chief executive officer have the tools necessary for the evaluation of progress made by his or her subordinates toward organizational goals. This, of course, makes the clear and explicit enunciation of those goals essential.
A police chief, for example, will typically require that any citizen, appearing at a police installation to report an act of police wrongdoing, be treated courteously and that the complaint be recorded and forwarded for investigation. This is the policy. If the chief asks for a report on the degree of compliance, he or she will inevitably receive a glowing account of how faithfully the requirement is observed. Executives who rely on such indices are in for rude surprises.
A proactive approach will involve the chief executive’s replication of the situations he or she wants to verify. Are the troops complying with requirements? Send an agent, posing as an irate citizen, into a police station to ask how to report an incident of police brutality. The treatment of that agent will establish, more accurately than the report, the reality that complaining citizens encounter.
Integrity tests might involve turning valuable property over to a cop on the street to see how he or she handles it. An errant motorist might explore a cop’s honesty by hinting at a payoff. The law cannot be broken by those seeking to enforce it. The point is to replicate the circumstances pinpointed as possible sources of problems to establish the true state of things.
Overt and Covert
A solid inspection will operate on two levels, overt and covert. The overt function involves interviews, examination of records, physical inventories, random sampling, polling, and related techniques intended to elicit facts. Covert operations will involve the use of police informers within the ranks to report on actual conditions, as well as self-initiated and proactive integrity tests or checking on adherence to procedures. It might involve as simple a process as making a number of phone calls to establish a commander’s accessibility to the public, or willingness to be the target of police shakedowns in order to test a suspicion, which under such controlled conditions would enable the inspectors to verify and record the activities.
A sound organization understands its mission and develops strong programs and sound policies to achieve its goals. It cannot then rest on its laurels and hope all will be faithfully performed. Systems of verification have to be established to ensure adherence to policy, at the street level.
Goals of Inspection
A sound inspection program will identify the effective leaders as well as those who must be weeded out. It will promote the organization’s progress by identifying the high performers and pointing them toward higher responsibilities. It will also enable the agency to pinpoint those paying little more than lip service to organizational policies and goals. The importance of this latter point is frequently ignored, because of the desire to avoid negative connotations. The fact is that identifying the losers and winners becomes one of the key features of any system attempting to enhance organizational effectiveness.
A comprehensive inspection program will provide the chief executive with a report that completely describes the operations of the unit examined, thereby enabling the chief to make informed judgments on the levels of performance and to take corrective action or otherwise respond to positive findings. Such an inspection program will also promote organizational introspection—forcing commanders to focus on policy and then to verify how faithfully it is carried out. No commander would want to risk the chief’s discovering the problems first.
Conclusion
An organization exists for a purpose. To achieve that purpose, it must organize itself into boxes, assign tasks, and prioritize functions. Once it sets out to produce results, the administration needs to verify how well it is doing. Inspection is the key to this process. The key ingredient of any such process of monitoring and control is the commitment of the chief to the task; the chief executive must believe in the process or it will fail.
