Police Leadership Challenges in a Changing World
Anthony W. Batts, Sean Michael Smoot and Ellen Scrivner
Executive Session on Policing and
Public Safety
This is one in a series of papers that will be published
as a result of the Executive Session on
Policing and Public Safety.
Harvard’s Executive Sessions are a convening
of individuals of independent standing who take
joint responsibility for rethinking and improving
society’s responses to an issue. Members are
selected based on their experiences, their reputation
for thoughtfulness and their potential for
helping to disseminate the work of the Session.
In the early 1980s, an Executive Session on Policing
helped resolve many law enforcement issues of
the day. It produced a number of papers and
concepts that revolutionized policing. Thirty years
later, law enforcement has changed and NIJ and
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government are
again collaborating to help resolve law enforcement
issues of the day.
Learn more about the Executive Session on
Policing and Public Safety at:
NIJ’s website: http://www.nij.gov/topics/lawenforcement/
administration/executive-sessions/
welcome.htm
Harvard’s website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/
criminaljustice/executive_sessions/policing.htm
J U L Y 2 0 1 2
Introduction
Effective police leaders become adept at responding
to challenge. Like other organizations, police
agencies must balance constancy and predictability
with adaptation and change. Even as they
strive to standardize operations, most police
leaders recognize the fluid context in which their
agencies operate. They also understand that there
are forces to which police organizations must
adapt and evolve in order to remain effective
in a changing world. It is those forces that drive
organizational change and create new models for
conducting the business of policing.
Several of the papers written in conjunction
with the Executive Session on Policing confront
these forces for change. Bayley and Nixon (2010)
describe “the changing environment” for policing,
including the rise of terrorism, new patterns
of immigration, and increased accountability for
police. Gascón and Foglesong (2010) describe the
new budget realities that shape police agencies
and challenge the premise of public policing.
Other papers confront the changing dynamic
between the police and research (Weisburd
and Neyroud, 2011; Sparrow, 2011) and the idea