NCJ Number
224385
Journal
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin Volume: 77 Issue: 9 Dated: September 2008 Pages: 8-18
Date Published
September 2008
Length
11 pages
Annotation
Focusing on the development of a systematic structure, the author attempts to help law enforcement leaders institutionalize performance management and analysis.
Abstract
The approach to performance leadership is to identify, capture, and analyze a large number and wide variety of performance indicators that lead toward better practice. Measuring performance is intended to improve societal “good” (quality of life) while concurrently slowing the “bad” (wasteful spending, victimization, and public disorder). This model of police performance is encouraging for both employees and their department. For the agency, the benefit is in both hindsight (develop the ability to look backwards and extract useful information from data) and foresight (found in imagination and proactive management). Performance measures also promote organizational citizenship behavior, those job-related behaviors that are discretionary, not formally recognized by the organizational reward system, and, in the aggregate, promote the effective functioning of the organization. Employees perceive the agency’s decisionmaking systems as fair and, therefore, become more committed to organizational goals. Virtually everything in policing is subject to measurement and, as such, should be measured. A new era of police performance management has begun to emerge: top administrators pay closer attention to the logic behind measuring success, particularly connecting lower-level activities with higher-level goals to clarify employee expectations and define department obligations. With this new era of police performance management, this article shows how measuring police performance proves vital to success and has implications for employees, as well as the organization through the development of a police performance measurement system. 2 Tables, 25 notes