Police Organizational Structures Essay

Organizations are entities of two or more people who cooperate to accomplish an objective. (Peak, Policing America, 2012). A police department structure must be parallel so that this way its structure can be effective in completing the overall goal of protecting and helping the public. Over the years police agencies have followed a traditional structure but by the passing of years the structure is starting to evolve. Traditional police structure Traditional structures are based upon principles such as â€Å"specialization, Hierarchy of offices, rules and regulations, technical competence, official activity demands the full working capacity of the official and the office management following exhaustive stable written rules. These principles allow the structure to work efficiently. With that said â€Å"most police organizations are based on a traditional pyramidal quasi-military structure† (Peak, Policing America, 2012).in where all those principles are present shows an inverse relationship between rank and the number of personnel allows the structure from anyone having too much of authority. this is called the hierarchy rank which allows an organization to have a chain of command. for example from the base of the pyramid up the base is supervisor then mid-level managers and the top is administrators the higher you are on the pyramid the more responsibility you have. So in the chain of command the supervisor would report to mid-level managers and the mid-level managers would report to the administrators. Basically this structure in the past a police officer would be hired and would be able to get promoted through political favoritism it didn’t matter if the person was qualified or not because they attained he job through political favoritism. Evolving organizational police structure Organizational police structure has changed over the years as technology is changing, some of the things that have changed or in other words evolved from the traditional police structure is that in efforts to prevent corruptions they have got rid of some rules and policies this also helps to prevent â€Å"red tape†. Now instead of having a centralized organization the evolved structure has been decentralized. This means â€Å"Cities were divided into precincts, and precinct-level managers often, in concert with the ward leaders, ran precincts as small-scale departments by decentralization combined with  primitive communications and transportation gave police officers substantial discretion in handling their individual beat† (Moore, 1988) basically in the evolved structure the hiring of all personnel was not left to change they look for qualified managers, supervisors and administrators and after they are chosen they recruit qualifying officers. What do these both structures have in common?