Case Study on "Virtual County Police Department"

Case Study 10 pages (3266 words) Sources: 10

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Virtual County Police Department

The intention of this paper is to give a report on the operations of the Virtual police department. This is a police department in the county of Virtual that provides fundamental policing services to residents in this area. This paper will report on the issues that face this police department, and give recommendations at the end. The report will address six major sections including the historical issues, demographic issues, the organization and management of the department, the agency's culture, an analysis of the crime statistics, and recommendations for possible solutions to address issues in the case study.

From the background information of the department, it is clear that its history contributed a lot to the many issues that the department is facing. On its inception, the police department was under the leadership of officers who had no training on security matters, they were farmers by trade. To aggravate the situation further, the department discouraged the issue of formal education for its officers. On the other hand, in order to meet the luxurious benefits of the police union, and keep up with the recent economic hardships, the department has had to cut down on the finances that it could have used to offer effective training to the officers. This is a setback to the police department because training is an essential aspect of identifying and curbing crime. There is a need for formal training, and the acquisition of a higher education is an added advantage. According to Dominey, and Hill (2010), training, especially in higher education, is useful in enabling criminal justice practitioners to be more effectual in using the tact with which the society has entrusted them. These authors argue that this could be because the academic studies provide support for the questioning and analyzing of assumptions. The criminal justice officers will also have an opportunity to challenge texts, and will be able to recognize that there is a possibility of a range of solutions to issues. For instance, students may write assignments that have a basis on case studies in which they are supposed to discuss other options that they may have applied at the place of work considering the challenges and the discretion that is present. In the same way, student police officers may take part in role-play assignments with members of the community who volunteer from the local communities. After the role-play, the student police officers will write reflectively and critically regarding their performance in the role-plays. After assessment of their use of discretion, the trainers will give the students tips on how to improve their performance.

Another aspect of the police department's history is that the county executives have a lot of influence on the appointment of police chiefs. The executives appointed the chiefs, from without the department, who had little knowledge of the operations of the department. This practice hinders the independence of the chiefs as appointments by county executives force them to have political affiliations. They owe political allegiance to the people who appoint them. On the other hand, a time framework, within which the chiefs operate, does not exist, and they have had to rely on the tenure period of the county executives who appointed them to decide their fate. This makes difficult to retain a regular pool of leadership that has adequate experience on the management of the police department. The police department has also abandoned the practice of community policing, which is a policing method that ensures members of the have confidence in the system by allowing them to participate in some roles. This has led to isolation by the members of the public from the operations of the department.

To address the historical issues, the management needs to devise a policy that will tackle the inconsistencies in the current system. The policy should highlight the amount of funding that the police union gets, and it should not be at the expense of other important operations such as training. The management should develop a clear guideline that governs the in-service training of all officers in the department to keep them informed with the current information. The management should also encourage the community policing philosophy in order to manage properly the department's public relations (Kappeler, and Gaines, 2012).

A Chief, who is the overall manager of all the administrative and operational functions, heads the agency. The agency is divided into two main commands namely the Operations command, and the Administration command and a deputy chief heads each of these commands. From the background information, the Operations Command is an extremely large organ, making the sharing of work and responsibility irregular. This is even problematic because the elements within the Operations Command are functional in nature and cannot fit into the Administration Organ of the department. In the operations command, there are Bureaus and Divisions, with the Captains leading the Bureaus and the Lieutenants leading the Divisions. Much of the current management in the police department is young and has less than 15 years of experience in the supervisory positions. This poses a major challenge to the agency because these new leaders lack the required experience that will enable run the agency in an efficient manner. The police union is an important aspect of the agency's leadership, but it has caused major problems due to its exaggerated salaries. The union and the upper ranking commanders receive very competitive recompense package making them among the highest paid police departments in the area, able to draw and employ excellent applicants, but this has not been possible. Instead, there have been budget cuts to meet these high remunerations. These budget cuts have greatly restricted management and leadership training for the newly promoted leaders. In addition, the Education and Training Division has not been able to keep up with law updates, changes, and recent court rulings. To address this issue, there is a necessity for reorganization of the management structure, especially the Operational Command, in order to make its unit smaller and manageable to allow for equal distribution of work (Stojkovic, Kalinich, and Klofas, 2012). In addition, there has to be a policy that guides the remuneration of all officers to avoid allocating compensations packages beyond the stipulated amount.

The demographics for the Virtual Police Department indicate disparities, which hinder its effectiveness in making the system more reflective of the society. From the background information, it is eminent that are fewer women than there are men in all the units and divisions of the agency. This means that the department is male dominated despite women making the largest percentage of Virtual county population. In addition, minority groups lack or have inadequate representation in the department as indicated in the demographic information. For example, in most posts there is inadequate representation of Asians, Hispanics and other minority races in the police department. There is a need for the leadership of the police department to ensure adequate representation of the minority groups to reflect the actual composition of the community that they are serving. This is especially important because the minority racial and ethnic groups may view themselves as targets of offensive handling at the hands of the police (Weitzer, Tuch, and Skogan, 2008). The demographic information indicates that there is a challenge with regard to the overall population of the county in comparison to the number of officers to serve this large population. Although there is a consistent increase in the size of the population over the four years, the number of police officers remains quite constant. The large ratio creates an operation challenge because there are only a few police officers to serve a very large population.

The culture of Virtual County Police has contributed to a number of issues that the agency is facing currently. First, there have been a number of retirements, which have resulted in promotions from within the young and inadequately experienced officers, who have little knowledge about the department's operations. This is the rationale behind the exclusion of community policing philosophy making the system reactive rather than proactive. This implies that the community has little or no opportunity to contribute to the operations of the department. There is also a culture of cutting down on the budgetary allocations for training programs. This means that there is minimal or no management training for the newly promoted leaders. This makes it difficult for the young and inadequately experienced leaders to understand the basics of managing a policy agency. In addition, there is a culture of ignoring minor cases of rule bending and violations, although this was not previously the case. This could be the reason why there were minimal complaints against personnel with complaints regarding to conformance to laws were the least among the other complaints.

The crime statistics of Virtual Country are in three parts namely part I, part II and part III, as the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of Federal Bureau of Investigation distinguishes them. Part I crimes include criminal activities such as homicide, aggravated assault, theft, robbery,… READ MORE

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