NCJ Number
184523
Journal
National Institute of Justice Journal Issue: 234 Dated: December 1997 Pages: 2-8
Editor(s)
Judy A. Reardon
Date Published
December 1997
Length
7 pages
Annotation
The author views police departments as learning organizations by exploring how they can work smarter, the role of research and analysis in making collaborative organizations more successful, and steps police departments can take to foster institutional learning as a continual part of doing business.
Abstract
As police departments experiment with and assess the efficacy of strategies such as community policing, problem-oriented policing, and restorative justice, they can learn to better distinguish between conceptual failures and implementation failures. Thus, police departments as learning organizations should capitalize on their own experiences and those of others to continually refine strategies, tactics, operations, and networks of collaborators. Obstacles to becoming a learning organization are identified, as are ways of fostering a learning organization. The author notes police departments can become learning organizations by creating a research and development unit, conducting crime analysis that spans police department units, involving senior police officials in reducing turf battles between police department units, conducting an inventory of the skills of sworn and civilian employees and community groups, organizing police work around problem-solving, encouraging critical thinking, using middle managers to facilitate critical thinking, institutionalizing the bottom-up appraisal of organizational performance, convincing police officers that prior research has practical benefits for police departments and for them as individuals, and expanding police-researcher partnerships. 14 notes, 1 figure, and 1 photograph