Term Paper on "Organizational Behavior in Law Enforcement"

Term Paper 7 pages (2127 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Law Enforcement

Organizational Behavior

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR in LAW ENFORCEMENT

Organizational behavior within professional law enforcement in the United States differs substantially from the private sector. In many respects, law enforcement organizational culture is completely unique to policing. On the other hand, even the most diverse law enforcement organizations throughout the country share virtually identical organizational culture, despite significant differences in their relative size, geographic location, and the types of police work most often encountered, or the policing style necessitated by their specific communities and law enforcement assignments. Elements of law enforcement training and this shared organizational culture frequently accounts for a certain degree of alienation on the part of police and many civilian members of the very communities they exist to serve, including, often, their own families.

Police work is often quite dangerous, though not quite as dangerous as many civilian industries, such as coal mining, commercial fishing, and manning the counter at 24-hour convenient stores. Nevertheless, the realities of the day-to-day life of a street cop, especially in urban areas, is dangerous enough that officers typically shield their families from the knowledge of many aspects of their work. In other respects, law enforcement officers avoid certain discussions with family, simply because they believe, generally, that it is impossible for any civilians to understand what they go through at work, and therefore, limit many areas of conversation to fellow officers. Likewise, some of the details of their work require maintaining confidentiality from everyone outside the law enforcement community. Finally, there is often an emotional toll associated with the stresses of everyday police work that results in the development of psychological defense mechanisms that are inconsistent with emotional openness and availability to loved ones, even during off hours. On the part of family members themselves, they face the stresses of knowing that officers may routinely face life and death circumstances on the job.

Law enforcement officers also differ in their respective beliefs and attitudes about various elements of police organizational culture, which sometimes fuels heated arguments between them, as well as job dissatisfaction with treatment at the hands of fellow officers and superiors, as well as bitter rivalries between neighboring police departments, or more commonly, between police departments and sheriff departments, or state troopers within the same geographic area.

The most fundamental organizational behavior in law enforcement academies is unquestioning obedience and rigid adherence to every rule and every element of instruction. Different agencies impose their own variations of this theme, but generally, recruits must address respond to their instructors with "Sir, yes Sir" and "Sir, no Sir" in military boot camp fashion.

Many academies require recruits to salute any officer on academy grounds, and some academies also issue demerit cards to recruits, with orders to surrender them to any uniformed officer, anywhere, anytime, such as when they are the subject of a traffic stop, or observed violating any element of the rules and regulations pertaining to the details of their uniform or their conduct in transit to or from the academy.

Generally, most police departments maintain daytime academies to which recruits commute during normal business hours, while most state police agencies maintain residential academies in which recruits must live, fulltime, in military style barracks, for the duration of the academy program. Agencies also vary in many areas of specific academy rules of order, but universally, most aspects of police academy life derives from military-type training.

Virtually all law enforcement academies employ a system whereby recruits are immediately assigned to groups (or "squads") in the same manner as they will eventually be deployed after graduation. Likewise, group punishment (usually in the form of supplemental physical fitness exercises, such as pushups and extra running) for individual mistakes and rules violations are commonly employed, both as a motivational tool to the individual, and as a way of introducing recruits to the concept of internal self-governance. Even without explicit instructions to do so, recruits are responsible for motivating and encouraging each other, and sometimes, for deterring or punishing lackadaisical effort, "internally," as it were. In many respects, this previews the organizational behavior expectation that once on the street, police govern themselves, certainly without ever involving outside entities, and wherever possible, also without appealing to internal administration, except, perhaps, as a last resort.

In the United States, virtually all law enforcement agencies employ a Field Training system immediately after academy graduation. Generally, new officers are assigned to a Field Training Officer (FTO) for several months. Whether or not academy graduates are hired permanently depends on successful completion of the Field Training program, so new officers are assigned to more than one period of post academy training, with a different supervising FTO, specifically to make sure that personality issues between one new officer and one FTO do not result in the loss of a potentially good officer. In addition to the other reasons an academy graduate hopes to pass his initial field training, some agencies include a contractual agreement requiring full financial reimbursement for all expenses incurred in training recruits in the event one leaves the agency within a specified time period after graduation, or fails to qualify for permanent status.

During field training, new officers are introduced to the difference between "academy policing" and the "real" or "street" life of a working officer. In many respects, the blind obedience aspect of academy organizational behavior continues throughout the field training period, because new officers may be exposed to as many ways of doing the same thing as the number of FTO's they encounter, and there is no room for negotiation or compromise between new officers and their FTO's.

Despite all the formal statements issued by police department offices of public affairs about "community policing" and the cooperation between law enforcement and the public, the first rule of organizational behavior learned by new officers is that "on the street everybody lies." Law enforcement officers learn not to trust civilians, because, whether during a traffic stop, during an investigation, or even when taking complaints, their experience is that civilians are very rarely completely truthful with the police. Rarely do civilians acknowledge their guilt during a traffic stop: they argue about whether they were speeding after being paced or clocked on radar exceeding the speed limit considerably. Typically, on crime scene investigations involving a shooting at a crowded party, particularly in urban areas plagued by street gang activity, not a single person admits to witnessing the crime.

As often as not, even complainants themselves lie to the police, to embellish the details of the subject matter of the complaint in their favor. Victims of domestic assault very often lie to protect their victimizers, or even turn on the responding officers when they attempt to execute an arrest in which, by law, they have no discretionary authority to take any other action. As a result, many police officers trust only other cops, in general.

The other element of law enforcement organizational behavior that a new officer learns is that the trust of veteran officers must be earned, because "rookies" are all suspect, initially. This manifests itself mainly in two ways. First, new officers must prove themselves as reliable "back-up" in terms of getting themselves on scene quickly when needed, and by their willingness to "get dirty" with suspects, prisoners, and unruly or violent persons, when necessary.

Second, new officers must also establish themselves as trustworthy in terms of keeping things within the police family. In this regard, new officers are even more suspect, initially, as far as veterans are concerned. A new officer who demonstrates his understanding that "police themselves" by refraining from approaching management or higher administration over problems with fellow officers is eventually accepted by veteran officers. In that case, veterans may refer to a new officer, simply as being "OK" or "good people" amongst themselves, ironically, in much the same as members of organized crime might refer to each other as a friend of ours."

Conversely, a new officer who approaches supervisors or administration with problems or, even worse, who breaches the so-called "blue wall of silence" by contacting outside agencies or civilian authorities quickly earns the designation rat" among other officers and may find himself completely shunned by them, to the extent that nobody in his station house or precinct even talks to him. In New York

City, for example, (much more often in the era of "Serpico" than in today's political climate), officers considered "rats" sometimes found their lockers removed between shifts and replaced with a note directing them to the East River to recover their belongings and uniforms.

One of the most fundamental rules of organizational police behavior is that cops don't ticket (or arrest) other cops," at least not unless the crime is so serious that they have absolutely no choice. It is virtually unheard of for an officer on traffic detail to issue a summons to a driver who produces his own shield and credentials identifying him as an off-duty law enforcement officer, regardless of whether or not from the same agency,… READ MORE

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