Police Leadership - Challenges for the Eighties

• NCJ Number: 84052
• Journal: Journal of Police Science and Administration Volume: 10 Issue: 2 Dated: (June 1982) Pages: 181-188
• Author(s): L W Potts
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 8 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Challenges for police leadership in the 80's deal with police authority in a democracy, the administrative process, institutional leadership, police role ambiguity, and leadership in responsible administration.

Abstract

The essential challenge to those charged with oversight of police operations in a democracy is to ensure that police authority is constrained within proper boundaries. This involves determining how the exercise of police authority can be made to conform with the values, beliefs, and wishes of the citizenry. Although the societal ends to be achieved by the police are sufficiently well defined to serve as operational objectives, the agency itself has a degree of latitude in defining operational objectives. The administrative officers of a department are charged with relating organizational behavior to societal expectations. The essential task of administration is to make decisions about what the department is doing, what it should be doing, about internal management, and external relations with the public and government superiors. Institutional leadership is the articulation of the basic mission of an institution in conformance with public desires and enduring social values and integration of a commitment to that mission into the processes and operations of the institution. For the police, this means that administrative leadership involves mediation between the department and significant outside interests and mediation among subunits of the department. Administrative leadership also involves efforts to minimize police role ambiguity that seems from police obligations to enforce the law and also perform public services that relate to social control. The key to police administrative responsibility lies in the development of effective patterns of relationships between individual police officers and departmental policymaking and managerial structure, between the police leadership and elected officials, and between the police officer and citizens. Thirteen references are listed.