Organizational Theory

Introduction

In 1996, there were 1,316 "specialized" police agencies operating in the USA, constituting nearly 10 percent of all US police agencies (http://www.ojp.usdoj. gov/bjs/lawenf.htm), yet police researchers know little about them. This situation is surprising, given the fact such agencies are common and officers working for them typically have full arrest powers, are authorized to use force (including deadly force) against suspects, and in some cases, operate in jurisdictions that rival or exceed in geographic size those of municipal police agencies.

This study focused on one type of "specialized" police agency: college and university (campus) police departments. Ever since Yale University hired two off-duty New Haven police officers to walk foot patrol on its campus in 1898, colleges and universities in the USA have had a formal security entity available to "police" them (Bordner and Peterson, 1983). Only since the 1960s, however, has something resembling a "modern" police department (Sloan, 1992) existed on college campuses, and only since the 1980s has campus policing become "professional" in the sense that officers working for these agencies receive training and have levels of expertise comparable to those working for municipal police agencies (see: Bromley, 1996; Bromley and Reaves, 1998a, b; Sloan, 1992). Further, the number of police agencies operating on college and university campuses might surprise some. In 1996, for example, there were nearly 700 campus police agencies operating in the USA which employed over 43,000 sworn personnel and constituted over 53 percent of all "specialized" law enforcement agencies operating in the USA at the time (US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997). However, because the vast majority of police-related research has concentrated on municipal police agencies (and, to a lesser extent, sheriff's departments), little is known about "specialized" police agencies such as campus police departments.

Discussion

Similar to early research on municipal police agencies (e.g. Rubinstein, 1973; Skolnick, 1966; Van Maanen, 1974; Westley, 1970) that was largely descriptive, studies of campus police agencies have also tended to be descriptive, focusing on the tactical, operational, and programmatic characteristics of the agencies despite the fact campus police agencies possess many of the features of complex organizations. Knowledge about field operations and patrol tactics of campus law enforcement agencies serves an important purpose because it provides insight into what these specialized agencies "do." This knowledge may also provide evidence of how these organizations behave (Maguire and Uchida, 2000). However, a more thorough understanding of these agencies as examples of complex organizations can only occur by examining their organizational structures, including sets of factors that influence the shape of these structures.

Following the lead of prominent police organizational researchers, we examined several questions relating to the structure of campus police organizations. First, are the dimensions of the structure of specialized police organizations similar to those identified by prior research as common to large, municipal police agencies (e.g. horizontal and vertical differentiation; occupational differentiation (see Langworthy, 1986))? Second, how do internal and external factors help shape the organizational features of campus police departments? For example, do "internal" ...