Abstract
Policing has undergone significant change over the past 30 years, increasingly emphasising the importance of establishing and sustaining community partnerships. This has become more popularly known as community-oriented policing. Over nine chapters, Bond-Fortier’s (2020) Organizational Change in an Urban Police Department describes the steps one department took to adapt to this change and implement the community oriented-policing framework. Utilising a case-study approach, Bond-Fortier focuses on Lowell Police Department (LPD) in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1980 to 2005.
The introduction briefly addresses modern issues facing police agencies, specifically tensions related to officer-involved shootings and the role that technology plays in disseminating police interactions. The chapter ends by providing readers with summaries of each remaining chapter’s general content. Chapter 2 covers historical events which gave rise to the community policing wave that swept the United States in the 1990s, spanning from the professionalism era of policing up until the War on Drugs. This historical contextualisation culminates with Bond-Fortier arguing that the shift from a more traditional policing approach (e.g. rapid response to calls) to community policing can be difficult for organizations to do effectively.
Chapter 3 highlights theories of organizational change, such as theories of adaptation like contingency theory (e.g. Thompson, 1967) or ‘organic adaptation’ (e.g. Demers, 2007) that are related to managers’ reactions to the internal or external socio-political demands exerting pressure on a given organization to change; cognitive theories of change (e.g. Tushman and Romanelli, 1985; Weick, 1979) that concern how managers process relevant external events and initiate organizational change in response; and finally, social dynamics of perspective change (e.g. Demers, 2007) or a dialogic approach that incorporates relevant actors’ input (e.g. community response) as a mechanism through which an organization adopts new policies or practices.
In chapter 4, Bond-Fortier lays out the setting of Lowell, MA, between 1980 and 2005 and explains data sources used for the book. The data consist mostly of newspaper stories, general and special orders (directives handed down from police superiors to subordinates on codes of conduct), and interviews with key stakeholders from that period. Substantively, Bond-Fortier describes what both Lowell and the LPD were like (population metrics, department size, etc.), highlighting that LPD’s transition paralleled the election of new community leaders looking to distance Lowell from its corruptive past. Concerning city characteristics, Lowell, MA, is representative of many cities across America (compared to New York City or Los Angeles), having a population of around 100,000 and a mid-sized law enforcement agency. That said, a significant proportion of law enforcement agencies are embedded in rural areas – so the extent to which they are represented by the diversity and experiences of a city like Lowell, MA may be more tenuous. While a limitation to Bond-Fortier (2020), criminological literature generally has an urban-focused bias.
Detailed throughout chapters five to eight, Bond-Fortier addresses the actionable steps that both the LPD and various actors (e.g. politicians, general public) in Lowell took to reinvent the police department. Chapter 5 covers the implications of leadership change (e.g. police chief, political actors) in Lowell. Of salience, a retiring police chief, newly elected political actors, and a desire to distance Lowell from exposed corruption coalesced to create an ethos conducive to transforming the LPD. Chapter 6 then discusses the partnerships forged by the LPD to facilitate change. The LPD began collaborating with researchers at nearby universities, such as the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, who helped the department secure grants to financially support their endeavours. This enabled the department to establish neighbourhood precincts, better connect to the community through media, and to reach under-served populations.
Chapter 7 focuses on the significant internal adjustments made by the LPD which manifested through special and general orders. These orders served to mandate alterations of departmental policies, tasks required of officers, and to introduce new initiatives the department planned to adopt. Bond-Fortier relates such changes to tenets of organizational change theories, for example, how resource dependency theory suggests that external resources (such as grants) can provide impetus for change (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). This was exemplified by one directive which indicated that the department would begin prioritising (through grant-funded endeavours) the newly created partnerships (e.g. community interaction) over more traditional duties. While LPD made strides to reorient their organization, Bond-Fortier discusses how the community also helped facilitate change through support of policy initiatives. Chapter 8 details the multifaceted approach and streams of support leveraged by the LPD to institute policy changes at both the local and state levels. This required a confluence of actors (e.g. ‘civic entreprenuers’) motivated to produce change in Lowell, MA, and who supported the initiatives and desire of the LPD to reorient its mission.
The previous chapters focus on both Lowell and the LPD from 1980 to 2005, while chapter 9 provides more recent updates about the LPD. The chapter includes visuals which summarise the mechanisms of change utilised by the LPD as well as related positive outcomes (e.g. reductions in fear of crime). To determine whether the changes made are still having an impact, this chapter provides more recent insights through interviews with key stakeholders living in Lowell (in 2019). Finally, Bond-Fortier discusses how other departments can benefit from studying LPD’s strategies implemented to institute change, as they are recognised nationally as an exemplar for the community policing model. Bond-Fortier’s account of LPD’s change is a timely contribution during an era when police are facing unprecedented backlash from their communities. Policing research has long acknowledged that many departments only partially adopted the strategy, perhaps related to the difficulties outlined by Bond-Fortier: it requires a fundamental reorientation to the operational reality of a police organization, a change which many departments historically resisted.
While there are not many limitations to point out, a couple of areas necessitating further elucidation would be whether LPD was instituting other types of change concurrently that contributed to the crime reductions and changing priorities of officers. For example, one policing framework gaining popularity from 1980 to 2005 was problem-oriented policing, which similarly stipulates changing organizational priorities and decentralisation, but which has consistently demonstrated crime reductions among other benefits. In other words, given the rather ubiquitous search for innovative policing approaches taking place during the 1980s and 1990s, it could have been the multiplicative effect of various strategies working to produce the noted outcomes in the conclusion of the book. This also points to a broader issue within which Bond-Fortier’s (2020) work is situated, that the overall goals and objectives of community policing continue to be debated by modern policing scholars. Disentangling the impact of change specifically attributable to community policing may have been beyond the scope of Bond-Fortier’s (2020) work, though is something readers should consider.
Organizational Change in an Urban Police Department provides a comprehensive case-study approach to understanding how a policing organization fundamentally changed its operational focus. Police leaders would benefit from reading this book, especially if they are looking to institute organization-wide changes such as LPD did. In addition, this book may also aid policymakers in better understanding their role in procuring resources to fund change. Finally, this book caters to both students and researchers interested in policing and/or organizational change since Bond-Fortier (2020) makes an informative contribution to both disciplines.