Assessing Current Culture of Police Department



Assessing Current Culture of Police Department

Introduction

This paper covers cultural assessment and review of disciplinary process to implement organizational change in Police Department. This will be discussed using some artifacts which were earlier implemented by previous researchers in context of organizational behavior to implement organizational change and also include the observed behaviors of police department in controlling crime and initiating anti-criminal activities.

Robbins and Timothy (2011) argued that lack of understanding of organizational culture among employees leads to lack of trust and confidence in higher management, lack of motivation and willingness to do work, lack of trust between customers and clients and lack of awareness how to implement right strategies for particular tasks at right time. The researchers called this weak culture where core values are not widely shared across the organizational levels. The similar kind of scenario is found in current organizational culture of police department which calls an immediate change to increase the effectiveness of its functions. Some authors for e.g. (David, 1999; DuBrin, 2002) stated that organizational culture influences the organizational goals and effectiveness. They argued that by understanding and assessing the current organizational culture, an organization can greatly maximizes the effectiveness of its activities in both present and future tasks of organization. A detailed analysis of current organizational culture will help understand the need of several changes need to implemented for organizational change.

Discussion

Lack of Trust for New Chief

Police departments as highly regulated authority has sometimes formulate policies, rules and regulations which are sometimes uncomfortable with employees of department. This is what Robbins and Timothy (2011) in their book call “barrier to diversity” where people started lacking trust and confidence in higher authorities. The same kind of culture is found in police department where those policies and procedures have lead to institutionalized bias and lack of security among police officers when some outside officer is called to clean house. The strong culture in such scenario result culture as liability, where police officers might be afraid for their lack of compliance with such policies and procedures and feel that new officer might expose their frailties (Wilson, 2012). Barrier to diversity is significantly linked with employees distrust and lack of confidence in higher authorities. Further, morally corrupt officers may even influence honest inducted officers to start losing trust in new chief officer through stories, rituals, material symbols against him. Those honest officers may even hesitant to help new chief officer due to low of risk tolerance observed in culture of police department. It is also observed that many of police officers see discipline, rules and policies, and promotions as unfair across the department (Sanders, 2008).

Lack of Trust between Citizens and Patrol Officers

The culture of police department is also observed lacking “socialization” which leads to low trust among lower socio-economic groups. The people living in low socio-economic areas have low trust in patrol officer mainly because of their unjustified investigation and abusing their power to brutalize the innocent ...