Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The functions of police departments are an important part of public management practice and theory. Police agencies offer a context that hits on the theoretical and practical dilemmas in the field of public administration such as the politics-administration dichotomy, accountability in the Friedrich-Finer debate, issues of discretion, and the overall relationship between the bureaucrat and community. More recently, there has been a significant amount of attention refocused on the relationships between police and the communities they serve. This attention has been given due to the problems seen in the practice of policing. Despite the importance of this topic, there has only been minimal strides made in empirical research to understand the organizational correlates associated with problematic police practices. Nonetheless, policy agendas have been aimed at reforming the organizational nature of policing. Thus, as a Department of Justice funded study, this research empirically explores if public management and organizational theories can be good predictors of problematic police-community relationships. If so, what are the significant organizational factors that are predictive of police-citizen conflict specifically? In order to address this question, this study uses principal component analysis to create a composite index to measure police-citizen conflict. The index, comprised of three indicator variables of police-citizen conflict (use of force, citizen complaints, and assaults against officers), is created for police departments at the municipal level and their corresponding cities. This measurement provides a comprehensive outlook on the status of police departments in regards to their relations with the community. Organizational variables taken from various federal sources of nationally collected survey data are used to estimate the model using ordinary least squares regression. Utilizing official government databases provide an accurate and standardized comparison across police departments. The five categories of organizational variables that are hypothesized about include: representative bureaucracy, community engagement, professionalism, bureaucratic control, and fiscal stress. The findings portray that specific organizational indicators are correlated with overall police-citizen conflict. However, when looking at the impact of the organizational variables on each of the individual indicators that comprise the composite index, the findings show that different public management strategies impact each outcome in diverse ways. This can provide enlightenment for policy makers and police administrators in two ways. First, this study encourages the collection, dissemination, and use of police administrative data in order to make evidence-based policy recommendations. Second, this study provides policy guidance by identifying what organizational reform can make a difference in reducing police-citizen conflict and promoting positive police-community relations.