Police Work

In police work the input and conversation process is highly uncertain due to the rapidly evolving and unique inputs of every situation. The goal of every police action is an output of a safer community and a better standard of living for community members. Technology includes both material technology and skill and knowledge technology from the employees. In law enforcement the material technology can help during the conversion process but it plays a minor role compared to the skills and knowledge of the officer on the street. Police officers must work in a small batch and unit production because every situation needs to be addressed individually which leads to high level of technical complexity. When looking at Perrow's four types of technology law enforcement falls under the non-routine research group. Every department with a law enforcement organization must work with each other and therefore their interdependence is intensive and reciprocal.

With these ideas in mind you would expect a police organization to use fewer levels of hierarchy to best produce their product. However because a law enforcement organization functions as a government entity it has many more levels and is therefore not using the best structure with its technology to produce a safer community and higher standard of living.

The goal of law enforcement is to give the citizens a safer community to live in and add to a higher standard of living for the community and visitors. Despite many high level managers in police work believing statistics like traffic stops and arrests are the output of a police department they are in fact input and part of the conversion process. These activities by employees produce the output. Police departments are a service driven industry and as Jones (2013) noted "in all manufacturing and service organizations, activities are performed to create value-that is, inputs are converted into goods and services that satisfy people's needs" (p. 240).

Police work is a human driven process that applies the skills of highly trained officers in varying situations to convert the information and actions of others in order to produce the desired output. This creates low technical complexity which Jones (2013) stated "exists when conversion processes depend primarily on people and their skills and knowledge and not on machines" (p. 244). This means police work in small batch and unit technology according to Joan Woodward's theory. Each situation (even routine traffic stops) varies based on time, location, persons involved, environmental influences and many other factors. No two calls will ever be the same. Even if on the surface they seem similar there will be differences that must be considered during the input and conversion process to achieve the desired output. Law enforcement officers are highly trained and attend an academy, 3 month field training process and constantly updated training but this only prepares them to adjust their input and conversion process to each situation. They must be ready for any action and act accordingly to provide value to the tax paying citizen.

As these conditions are constant, Perrow's theory of looking at task variability and task analyzability means that law enforcement works in the category of nonroutine research. Nonroutine research involves high task variability and low task analyzability meaning it involves more unexpected situations where a high level of search activity exists (Jones, 2013, p. 252). Task variability is high because every situation can have different actions and inputs. You can train for a situation but every time an officer steps on scene many factors play into the scenario and at all levels, input,