NCJ Number
215407
Journal
Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice Volume: 48 Issue: 4 Dated: July 2006 Pages: 523-542
Date Published
July 2006
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This paper examines organizational dynamics in Canada's Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) that prevented the full implementation of community policing.
Abstract
The discussion begins with a review of the ways in which executives explained the RCMP's lack of progress in adopting community policing due to basic "misalignments." "Misalignments" refers to conflicts between existing and proposed management practices, mindsets, and technologies that could not be resolved. The paper then explores how executives attempted to foster frontline acceptance of community policing through the realignment in training and midmanagement during the latter half of the 1990s. Although these steps did produce significant changes in the RCMP, they fell short of their goals. This paper shows how the development of intelligence-led policing in the United Kingdom presented RCMP executives with a viable alternative to community policing but also appeared to offer greater alignment with the partial implementation of community policing, i.e., the use of problem-oriented policing and crime analysis. This review of efforts to manage change in the RCMP toward a full implementation of community policing shows how management tends to make only those changes that allow some continuity or management preferences for existing philosophies, practices, and competencies. The author argues that the shift in executive attention toward intelligence-led policing was an outcome of irreconcilable failures perceived during the adoption of community policing. Such management tactics are allowed because they reflect a view of policing that has generally greater support among most policymakers than full-blown community policing. 66 references