Organizational structures within police agencies have been of center-stage interest to the advocates of reform and professionalization since the inception of modern American policing in the early 20th century. The purpose of this article is to test the utility of contingency theory in its application to police organizational structures during the 1990s. Three waves of data from 280 municipal city governments and their respective police departments were collected in 1993, 1996, and 2000. Use of the random-effects panel data method of statistical analysis enables the authors to assess the relationship between structural changes in police organizations and three hypothesized factors, namely, environmental complexity, organizational size, and adoption of new technology. This article’s principal findings suggest that they have remained stable. Moreover, only a few independent variables are consistently correlated with the adoption of structural arrangements in American municipal police departments during the 1990s.
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