Wayne Welsh, Philip Harris: Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, 4th Edition

Case Studies with Questions and Answers

Chapter 05: Implementation

Scenario based on Case Study 5–2 (Hot Spots Policing: Implementation Issues)

Mastrofski, Weisburd, and Braga (2010) have proposed that U.S. police agencies should be fundamentally restructured around the ideas of “hot spots” policing and that a national research effort should evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed reforms. Drawing on theories of organization and innovation, Maguire (2010) raises questions about the capacity of American police to implement and sustain the proposed reforms with the intended fidelity and dosage. He concludes that any national research agenda on hot spots policing should pay at least as much attention to implementation and sustainability as to effectiveness.

Questions

Given the ambitious and far-reaching nature of the proposal, there are reasons to question whether the proposed innovation can (or will) be adopted with the prescribed levels of fidelity and dosage. What are these reasons?

Correct Answer

Recent studies have cast doubt on the extent to which problem-oriented policing has been implemented in ways consistent with Goldstein’s (1990) prescriptions. If shallow problem-solving efforts with “weak analyses, mostly traditional responses, and limited assessments” are the norm, then why should we expect anything different with this ambitious new proposal?
Strategic reform efforts in policing, including team policing, community policing, and problem-oriented policing, all seem to have encountered a seemingly insurmountable set of constraints in their quest to alter the core technologies of policing. The current proposal pays insufficient attention to these constraints (e.g., culture, structure, environment, history, and tradition).

Why are many criminal justice agencies unlikely to adopt proven “evidence-based” interventions?

Correct Answer

We often assume that if there is sufficient evidence that a program or policy “works,” organizations will embrace it and implement it. However, four decades of research in the organizational sciences fail to find strong support for rational choice theories of organizational behavior. Since the late 1960s, organizational scholars have invested substantial effort in specifying and testing theories that seek to explain the seemingly irrational behaviors of organizations. Irrationality is a particular concern among public- sector organizations, which are often able to persist in spite of compelling evidence of their ineffectiveness and inefficiency. The unfortunate reality is that evidence about what works is an insufficient motivator to compel people and organizations to do things differently.