VELCRO IN A TEFLON WORLD

It Can Be Frustrating being Velcro in a Teflon World

It Can Be Frustrating being Velcro in a Teflon World

Introduction

In this reflective paper, my focus will remain on the Oakland Police Department and resignation of Chief of Police. I believe it can be frustrating being Velcro in a Teflon world, therefore in this paper Oakland Police Department will remain my backdrop and Teflon as my metaphor. I will use Teflon as a metaphor for this reflection to describe Oakland Police Department functionality. Furthermore, I will base this reflection paper on Morgan's text to identify a metaphor that best describes how the organization functions.

Reflection

I believe that the environment caused the Police Chief not to "stick around" and that is proved the articles in the Oakland Tribune about the resignation of the Chief of Police. He worked for three years with the city administrator and the mayor's offices to expedite hiring more officers. Many residents and experts believed that the department is significantly understaffed for a city of 400,000 residents and a high crime rate (Campion, 2009).

The chief had overseen the department's move to 12-hour patrol shifts and an area command system aimed at bringing more accountability, cracking down on crime hot spots and solving neighborhood issues. The chief had led the department in its efforts to comply with a settlement stemming from the 2000 scandal involving a group of rogue officers known as the Riders. He previously served as assistant Alameda County sheriff and was a 38-year veteran of the sheriff's office before becoming Oakland's top cop (Campion, 2009). However, rest assured we must make sure the Police Department is continuing to do everything possible to make our community safe. The actual reason for his resignation is the burdensome "bureaucracy" left him without enough power to fight crime and build community trust in his department. He was a charismatic leader who sought to bring Oakland into step with a trend toward data-driven policing (Gareth, 2006).

That is because I chose Teflon as a metaphor for this paper. However, before we move ahead on this issue I would like to balance the understanding level of readers by briefly defining the concept of Teflon since I believe in order to understand the viewpoint of this reflective paper it is necessary for a reader to completely understand the concept and origin of Teflon. Teflon is a nickname given to persons, particularly in politics, to whom criticism does not seem to stick and this term comes from Teflon, the brand name by DuPont of a "non-stick" chemical used on cookware (Kären, 2008).

On the other hand, we refer to the Morgan's book "Images of Organization" to understand the functionality of an organization. It is possible that none of Morgan's metaphors or a combination of two or more aptly describes the organization. Morgan describes common assumptions about organizations - he helps to reveal the hidden assumptions behind the manager's perceptions (Gareth, 2006). What do we mean when we say that 'organizations are ...