Police Organization and Future Research

Recent changes in a “post-bureaucratic” direction indicate that police departments have reached a new stage in development as attempts to counter the effects of reform bureaucratization result in new ways of crossing organizational boundaries. Our current research on police supervision indicates the dependency of police behavior on extra-organizational processes. Organizational change and research results both point toward the establishment of research districts which can experiment with widely varied ways of organizing and carrying out police work. Within the research district context, several more specific research questions are suggested.