Management Influences on Officer Traffic Enforcement Productivity

Abstract

There is significant evidence that aggressive traffic enforcement strategies can have an impact on traffic safety, public disorder and street crime. However, individual patrol officers often devote different levels of effort to traffic patrol with some producing very high levels of citations and arrests, while others produce few or none at all. Therefore, it would be useful for police executives to know how they can effectively motivate officers to engage in high levels of traffic enforcement. This study evaluates a theoretical approach to motivating patrol officer productivity in the areas of traffic citations and drunk driver arrests, and applies this approach across a number of police agencies in one metropolitan area. The findings support this approach and suggest that patrol officer productivity in these two performance tasks is significantly predicted by management expectations, officer capability, officer opportunity, the perception of rewards, and the modelling of the behaviour by the officer's shift supervisor.