Increasing Police Utility through Organizational Design

Abstract

Research by social scientists over the past decade provides strong evidence that American policies concerning police organizational designs have served in many instances to restrict the social usefulness, or utility, of local police operations. Substantial changes in police organizational designs are unlikely to occur unless policymakers have relatively comprehensive and complete models. To satisfy policy officials, a model must be (1) easily understood by laypersons, (2) logically related to definitions of problems acceptable to policymakers, (3) sufficiently defined to provide guidelines for systemic, incremental changes, and (4) adequate to facilitate simple, but accurate, assessment of the impact of changes consistent with the model. This paper is in pursuit of such an alternative model for improving police utility.