ecdd1147 - Management Responsibilities in the Police Field

by: Marc Quimper, M.B.A. Consultant, Workshop proceedings, Canadian Police College, May 1997

FUNCTIONAL COMPETENCIES

Client - Ethics, Professionalism and Integrity [Mission, Vision & Values]
Response - Personal Effectiveness and Flexibility [Action Management]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

It was with pleasure and a certain sense of relief that I accepted the invitation to participate as a speaker in this workshop.

It is always a pleasure for a speaker to address an audience of your calibre, because this tells us that, in spite of a certain public perception, there are still people who are very concerned with the development of policing in a constantly changing environment.

As for my relief, it is due to the fact that, within the police community, there is a tendency to avoid such taboo subjects as the real responsibilities of the chiefs and their managers, the place of women In the modern police organization, and the place that the police should have in our society. For this workshop, the organizers decided to remove the veil of secrecy from some of these subjects, stir things up a bit, and find solutions to some problems that, for the most part, we should already have solved.

Managers will say that their operational and administrative responsibilities are many and varied.

According to international management expert Henry Mintzberg, planning, organization, direction and control make up, or should make up, 1/6 of a manager's tasks!

I would now like to share with you my vision of each of these responsibilities and relate them all to the main theme of your workshop.

Integrity is a word that has been coming back into fashion in recent years, in recent months. Two institutions that the public wants to be above any suspicion, namely the police and the army, have credibility problems because some of their members, but not all police officers and soldiers, have broken the rules that they, more than any other professionals, were supposed to obey.

The concept of integrity is more than the simple criterion of personal honesty. It is also professional honesty, and adherence to convictions, at least those that serve to guide the ideals of men and women before they enter the police force. Ensuring that integrity is, and remains, the concrete foundation on which a solid structure capable of weathering storms is built is a heavy responsibility to assume, because it is essential to ensure that no officer strays from it, either personally or professionally, if all the troops are to follow the same path. When a chief and/or his or her managers forget this primary responsibility, they can be sure that, within short order, they will be faced with a period of great turbulence.

Customer service is a secular concept that is coming back into fashion together with the community policing concept, and that's all to the good. However, translating fine words into concrete actions is more difficult, because the police, being a monopolistic enterprise has, at least in recent years, always decided what was good for its various customers. Asking its customers what they want in the way of a police department is a fairly recent development and one that is greatly appreciated by the public.

After deciding that customer service is important, you have to move on to the qualitative stage and take the necessary steps to provide a very high quality of service to all your different groups of customers. Putting yourself for a few minutes in the shoes of a citizen who is in contact with the police for any reason is an excellent exercise, well worth doing, which raises our awareness of the professionalism that must be shown by each member of the department, who acts every day as an ambassador for both the profession and his or her organization.

Innovation, the opposite of the status quo, is a concept that k gaining acceptance in police departments, thanks in part to the budget situation. This doesn't mean that you have to throw out everything in your organization on the ground that you want to innovate! However, in a very conservative enterprise such as a police department, it is important to call to mind more often this saying by the famous Babe Ruth: "Yesterday's home runs don't win tomorrow's games."

Police departments are faced with new kinds of crime, increasingly complex social problems, and the disintegration of values that have always served to guide our society. Police department managers on their own cannot solve all these problems. Through their leadership, senior officers must encourage each employee group and each member, regardless of his or her status in the organization, to come up with new ideas.

I have always thought that the janitor is just as important as the chief; only their responsibilities are different. If the chief goes on holiday for a month, the department,u,, should be able to continue serving its clientele with no problem. But if the janitor stops emptying the police station's wastebaskets for five days, the organization is on the verge of a crisis!

An employee's idea, if taken into account, may improve customer service, may reduce the costs of a project, and, in short, may contribute to the organization's advancement. The question is whether employees at the lower end Or the scale are being heard, or simply listened to out of politeness.

In the management field, each period has had its own methods and its own gurus to show us what path to take and tell us what we should or should not do. It is not always easy to follow their teachings and the result of their magic formula does not always measure up to our expectations. I am, very humbly, going to try to give you some idea of the paths that I have had to try out myself to get through the rough spots.

Training, periodic questioning of our ways of doing things, courage under all kinds of pressure, quality control with our customers, perseverance, listening, and vision are some of the elements that contribute to a working knowledge of the three strategic responsibilities noted earlier.

The training required to be a police officer his changed a lot over the past twenty-five years. At each stage there were problems, because the officers in place did not always take kindly to the arrival of graduates from high schools, colleges, and universities. Police organizations must keep pace with the changes happening in society and, if possible, anticipate change rather than follow in its wake. Training is an indispensable tool for doing this.

Periodically questioning our ways of doing things is a test of effectiveness that is used primarily in the private sector, competition making it inevitable. just because we have been doing things the same way for years, should we necessarily keep doing them that way? Two keys to success are the following: not waiting for society to force us to change; and being proactive in our search for ways to eliminate the causes of the real problems.

Dictionary definitions of the word courage cover a lot of ground: moral strength, heroism, velour, pluck, bravery, boldness. So saying someone has courage doesn't really say very much! Yes, it does take courage not to give up when faced with adversity, with pressure from all sides and everywhere at once to make us abandon our chosen path. I have always kept in mind the following maxim: "Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm" (Publilius Syrus). Real managers are not marina captains; no matter how bad the storm, they keep their eyes on the lighthouse and use it to bring their vessel, passengers and crew safe into port.

I am going to take the liberty of a short anecdote. On a beautiful sunny Friday in July, in the late 1 980s, in a police department where I was in charge, my operations manager came to see me to tell me that the night shift, for the whole weekend, would be made up exclusively of women. He wanted to let me know the situation, not because he found it abnormal, but because it was already causing a lot of talk in the halls. "That's crazy", they were saying in the police station, once the news was official, "If things heat up, they won't have the size or the strength."

A civilian employee would be looking after reception and dispatch, while one female officer would be supervising three other female officers on patrol. The weekend went by as usual. The number of service calls was the same, as was the number of arrests! On Monday morning, tongues were wagging. The women certainly didn't arrest any major criminals. They answered routine calls. In short, some of their male colleagues did not believe that they could have faced the same challenges as them, and especially that they could have done it successfully.

Controlling the quality of police services is one of the main ways of ensuring that we are effectively meeting our strategic responsibilities. Assuming that everything is fine because there are no complaints against the department, or because the results of the latest survey showed 95% of citizens were satisfied with the police, or because our superiors seem satisfied is, without any doubt,' the best way to wake up one morning with an unexpected crisis on our hands. There is no shortage of examples in the context of law enforcement, and it is not always in other countries or other cities that these things happen.

By means of sampling and clearly defined criteria, we must check whether the work of our "ambassadors" and our support staff is being done in accordance with quality standards that are known to all. Why are police organizations so slow to measure up to the standard, or at least do the best they can to measure up?

Perseverance is without doubt one of the principal criteria for success today, as it was in the past. Often, we have seen people give up just when they were getting close to reaching their goal. I am including in the notion of perseverance the attempts we must make before succeeding, before reaching our objective, even If there are a number of obstacles in our path.

Listening to our environment, the people around us, and our customers, is the very basis of an ongoing innovation process. How difficult it can be sometimes to listen to some of our colleagues or some customers who are more demanding than others! I agree that listening to people complain can become irritating or depressing, but if it is seen as a source of improvement in the services provided, very noticeable results can soon be seen.

Lastly, there is vision. Obviously, it is very difficult to know where we are going if we don't know where we are coming from. Vision is a fundamental quality for a high-calibre manager. It is the gasoline, the fuel that propels the organization to the greatest possible heights. To be a visionary is to dream and give effect to things that everyone believes to be impossible. Great visionaries have often been perceived as beings who came from another world, because they were different from run-of-the mill managers. Such visionaries are always people who interested in expanding their minds, trying out different ways of doing things, and promoting concepts that can lead to profound changes.

A form of management that encourages managers to assume true responsibilities will have many noticeable repercussions on policing, insofar as the example is set at the top.

The integration of women into the police, and especially into police culture, will really pick up speed once more chiefs and managers adhere to the fundamental responsibilities listed at the start of this presentation.

The following well-known quotation, which comes from a different era and sets out the basic principles of community-based policing, forces us to ask ourselves about the place and the number of women in the police milieu: "Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence." [Sir Robert Peel]

If women make up 52% of the population, how do we explain that, in the year 2000, only 10-15% of all police officers will be women?

Fighting for our convictions, promoting a high quality of service for our various customer groups, including women, and having the courage to innovate are all necessary~ingredients for a complete and accelerated integration of women into a milieu that has, for a long time - too long in fact - been dominated by an exclusive group. Of little consolation to you, ladies, I am sure, is the fact that the situation is even worse in fire departments.

I encourage all chiefs and managers to undertake a self-evaluation of their organization, in terms of strategic responsibilities, and to pair this evaluation with the situation of women in the relevant milieu.

Lastly, one thing that serves to inhibit the integration of women into police organizations is the affirmative action that the organizations must take In their regard. If police chiefs are not convinced that it is important to integrate into their department a point of view that differs from the traditional, I do not believe that forcing them to do so will lower the resistance. On the contrary. There is no magic answer, and, in my humble opinion, we have to explore all avenues suggested by this workshop.

In conclusion, the organizers of this workshop have asked me to share with you my vision of how a police department should be managed. You will see that it comes right back to the very roots of policing.

Even though we live at a time when information travels at almost excessive speeds, and technology is becoming increasingly complex, we must always come back to the "why" of our existence as an organization.

We exist because the people want us to, because they want a department that helps, advises and protects them. Our fellow citizens want a police department' event that listens to their needs and expectations, and can help them to live better and improve the quality of life in their neighborhood.

They do not want to know if you have major national or international programs to fight crime, drug use or auto theft. What they want to know about is what small prevention programs you have introduced in their neighborhood, what you are doing to make the streets safer for their children when they go to school or the park. The elderly want you to reassure them that they are safe when they take their daily walk. Women want to be able to return home at night in peace, without danger of being attacked. Adolescents, with the difficulty they have communicating, want police officers - who don't have difficulty communicating - to talk to them like human beings. People want to know what the police are doing about street lights that are still not working after several days. They also want officers on patrol to get out of their big cars and take the time to talk to them.

The public wants tangible, visible, and, in particular, human results. They do not want to be statistics.

In the end, managing a police service amounts to doing what is necessary for one's fellow citizens to be happy and feel comfortable in their neighborhood, city or village. It is simple and complex at the same time. The dilemma the chief faces is to decide what his objective will be:

On that note, I would like to thank you for your attention and wish you an excellent workshop.

MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE POLICE FIELD