Managing Innovation of Policing Research Paper

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This research paper seeks to address some of the main issues in relation to the management of innovation in public policing without the pretense of being exhaustive. This research paper will first contextualize innovation in public policing by paying attention to evolutions in our contemporary society. Second, the paper zooms in on the content of innovations in public policing and aspects of the process of diffusion. Third, attention is focused on challenges related to the process of managing these innovations. Finally, the paper concludes by suggesting some ideas for future research, which are needed to move forward in the field of managing innovation in public policing.

Introduction

All innovations represent change but not all changes are innovative (Etter 1995, p. 278).

Managing the innovation of public policing is a challenge for police leaders around the world. These innovations are driven by evolutions in our contemporary society, and chance events are often related to the upsurge of reforms in this field. There is significant diversity in the content of innovations taking place. Furthermore, these innovations are conceptualized, studied, and measured in different ways. It is unclear what the effects of most innovations are on public police performance. Nevertheless, they are disseminated and mimicked all over the world. Police leaders have no choice but to get up to date. Knowledge on the content of the innovations is required to get ready for the process of adoption and diffusion. Unfortunately, concepts and ideas of innovation often lack a translation to practices. There is little coherence in broader understandings of what works, in which specific context, based on which implementation strategies, or how it was supposed to work but actually failed. This hampers fundamental changes in the functioning of the police and requires more research in the field of innovation in public policing. In this research paper, we address each of these aspects more in detail.

By addressing the management of innovation in public policing, we enter the crossroad of literature on innovation and change management in public organizations, on the one hand, and literature on public police studies and innovations, on the other hand.

A first observation to be made is that the definition of the word “innovation” has subtly changed since the late 1960s. It is no longer enough to introduce a new idea, to be creative, to talk about innovation. The idea has to be brought into use, be successful, before innovation can be said to have taken place. Mulgan and Albury (2003, p. 3) define innovation as “new ideas that work” and to be more precise successful innovation is the creation and implementation of new processes, products, services and methods of delivery which result in significant improvements in outcomes efficiency, effectiveness or quality. The change in the content of this concept reflects the current societal pressure on public and private organizations all over the world to be successful in dealing with societal transformations.

Since the eighties, this evolution has been known as New Public Management in the public sector, which has featured the transfer of principles from the private sector to the management of public organizations. Principles such as external orientation, service delivery, partnership, debureaucratization, performance management, accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness are at the core of the movement and were used in (inter)national public sector reforms (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). These principles can also be found in the philosophy of community-oriented policing, which frequently has been operationalised as external orientation, accountability, empowerment, partnership and problem-solving.

When looking at high-performing innovative organizations in the public sector, leadership is one of the key characteristics.

These leaders, these senior managers and lead professionals are hungry, thirsty, exploring all the time the external environment. These are people who are both externally and frontline oriented in their approach to management. And they maintain a ‘split screen narrative’; they are interested in innovation but not for its own sake, rather they are concerned about how to continue to improve their day-to-day operations and services and products while at the same time building innovative capacity to address present and future challenges. (Albury 2011, p. 230)

Furthermore, there is a difference being made between management and leadership, which is crucial to the management of innovation. In essence, leadership is all about inspiring, motivating, coaching, and mobilizing individuals and groups. Leaders have a vision by which they give directions for the future. Although managers can be leaders, the management process as such is more about bringing consistency within the organization by planning, organizing, budgeting, controlling, and the like (Bennis 1993). From this perspective, innovation is mainly related to the leading capacities of managers in terms of being creative and entrepreneurial and which has been described as “transformational leadership” (Bass and Avolio 1990).

Although innovation might be considered to be the new buzzword in policy documents on public organizations, it is worthwhile to transcend fads and fashions in addressing the management of innovation in public policing (Abrahamson 1991). Therefore, it is essential to use a historical approach to this subject and to contextualize it in the dynamics of our contemporary society/societies. The role of the environment of any public organization in stimulating the demand for change is inevitably and should be taken into account. It is a lesson learned based on the contingency approach and (new) institutional perspective in the change management literature (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Scott 2001; Maguire and Uchida 2000).

Contextualizing Police Innovation

It cannot be denied that the times we are living in today are characterized by constant change. Concepts such as “postmodern society,” “risk society” or “Information Age,” and the “Network society” are being used to refer to the major transformations in our global world. Changes in relation to our economy, politics, ecology, technology, demography, culture, religion, values, and social interactions are at the heart of it.

The combination of economic forms of globalization (interconnectedness of world financial markets, extensions of free trades, technological standardization, and internationalization), cultural globalization (through movies, fashions, and sporting events), and social changes in the pattern of life (increased life expectancy, changes in the patterns of family life, rise in the level of unemployment and migration flows, etc.) makes the nature and pace of change today unique (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011).

Apart from the new opportunities and chances, these driving forces influence the problems arising in our societies. The nature of threats, risks, crime, criminals, and criminal organizations is changing, and the “localized citizens’ demands” for more security and protection are rising all over the world. To answer these “demands,” the public police has up until now gone through a period of significant change and innovation (Mastrofski and Willis 2010). Processes, services, and methods of delivery have been revised to improve the functioning of the public police. To get accustomed to new social media such as Twitter and Facebook, mobile communication, and the need to closely work together with other (security) actors in the field are just some of the challenges the public police face today.

The current European and North American (economic) crisis is adding greater complexity to it all. Castell and his network of academics talk about “the Aftermath” referring to an era before and after the economic crisis of 2008 (www.aftermathproject.com). It is a social crisis which is bringing about a fundamental transformation of societies at large. Citizens are being challenged to become creative in dealing with this new context and so are policy makers and (leading) managers in the public sector. The time has come to produce significantly better outcomes for significantly lower costs (Albury 2011). Austerity measures generate immense pressures on all public services, including the police. Instead of doing more with less, in some countries, the police might have to find a way to do less with more (involving more people and delivering more impact). This means that a smaller (less public money is available), smarter (better use of informational and human assets), and sharper (interventions targeted to where they can make a difference) style of policing is considered to be a possible way to deal with this challenge (Innes 2011, p. 80). The way in which this context may be fertile ground for innovations is still to be seen but worthwhile to follow up as it might depend on policy choices made by politics.

It is important to note that these driving forces may provide pressure, but they do not supply the ideas for innovation, which is to be generated by (leading) managers of public policing. The question arises: “what is yet to come and what will be the content of the innovations for policing in the future?” Groups of academics and/or practitioners working on a vision on policing for the future address these questions, and most of them rely on the societal transformations mentioned above to start thinking creatively about possible future challenges for the functioning of the police. Interesting in this respect is the RAND publication on “Moving Toward the Future of Policing” and the activities of the “Pearls of Policing” network, which bring together police leaders from around the world to think about a vision on policing the future. These networks raise questions on what the main challenges will be for police work in the next decades. In their writings and conferences ideas, knowledge and experiences are shared which can be inspiring for law enforcement leaders around the world.

Finally, chance events such as scandals, disasters, accidents, and unpredictable tragedies are quite often related (as a catalyst) to the upsurge of reforms in the public sector (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). For example, the Marc Dutroux scandal (serial killer and child molester) and more specifically the lack of information exchange between the existing police agencies at the time was one of the reasons for the substantial reorganization of Belgium’s law enforcement sector in 1998. With the law on the integrated police force (07/12/1998) structured on a local (local police) and a federal (federal police) level, the State Police, Municipal Police, and Criminal Investigation Department, who used to be separate agencies, were integrated. During the reorganization community policing was introduced by law. This illustrates the dynamic relation between the public police and its societal environment in terms of change and innovation.

In what follows, the content of public police innovations and some aspects of the process of diffusion are considered.

The Content And Diffusion Of Innovations In Public Policing

Although there might be some overlap (Scott 2009), community policing, broken windows policing, problem-oriented policing, pulling levers policing, third-party policing, hot spots policing, CompStat, evidence-based policing, intelligence-led policing, telemetric policing, restorative policing, and zero-tolerance policing are all considered to be major innovations in (American) public policing developed during the last three decades (Weisburd and Braga 2006; Scott 2009). The classification as “major” refers to the influence of these innovations on the broad array of public police tasks and on the practices and strategies that broadly affected the public policing of American communities. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington terrorist-oriented public policing can be added to this list as one of the broad and quite complicated innovations (Mastrofski and Willis 2010, p. 117).

Nevertheless, there is some discussion on whether the innovations above are cultural and/ or structural; incremental or radical; strategic, administrative, technical, or programmatic; and focusing on a single service, a department, or the total organization of the police (Damanpour 1991; King 2000). In relation to innovations, the question often persists whether it is rhetoric or reality. This discussion creates a division between “believers” and “nonbelievers” on each of these innovations between and within the community of scholars and practitioners. It is reflected in the lively debate in the literature of which Weisburd and Braga (2006) present a representative sample. Currently, however, it is not clear at all where the state of the art is in research on these innovations in public policing.

The notion of a policing model is found to be useful in making the complexity of innovations comprehensible. Ponsaers (2001, p. 473) roughly discerns four police models: the military bureaucratic model, the lawful policing model, the community-oriented policing model, and the public-private divide policing model. Each of these models is considered to have an internallogical vision which has a critical function and involves basic assumptions in itself about the role and the place of the police in society. This includes a position in relation to key questions about police discretion, the role of the law, responsibility, relationships with the population, professionalization, legitimacy, prevention, and pro-/reactive police force policy. These are the key issues being influenced by the broader societal context mentioned above. From this perspective, these police models can be considered to be important innovations in policing.

The importance of these police models for the topic of managing police innovation is threefold. First, it shows that police innovation is related to the timeframe in which it takes place. The military bureaucratic model, now considered to be the traditional model, was innovative at the time in dealing with the problem of corruption, politicization, and the lack of professionalism. The postmodern “Public-Private Divide Model” fits into the current challenges for the police in an era of economic crisis and an evolving security field in which there is an increasing degree of interaction between public and private bodies. A second reason is that this approach makes it possible to distinguish these police models from other kind of concepts and to clear up the conceptual “mess.” For example, discerning four police models makes it possible to emphasize that the broken windows theory is not a model but a theory. In this line of reasoning, problem-solving/oriented policing and reassurance policing are a variant of the community policing model, and intelligence-led policing is simply the result of an evolution in technology (Ponsaers 2001).

The third reason why police models are important to address the issue of innovation is that police models are not to be considered as sequences in time, they are not chronological episodes but logic deductions. In other words, reform processes inhibit a programmatic choice and the danger of a return to more conservative police models is always present. Importantly, a police organization can be considered as a combination of police models. The combination will vary in relation to the political consensus and integration within society. In that respect, the responsibility of police chiefs and politicians is huge (Ponsaers 2001, p. 492).

Despite the discussions, it is important to note that most of the innovations mentioned above have to varying degrees been “exported” throughout the (Western) world. Overall, there is optimism among scholars as Weisburd and Braga (2006, p. 12) observe police agencies have become open to the idea of innovation, and that new programs and practices have been experimented with and adopted at a rapid pace over the last few decades. Efforts are being made to “translate” some of these concepts to different contexts (see, e.g., Ponsaers and Easton 2008) and to implement the innovations, often conceptualized in the Anglo-Saxon world, to other continents where public police units, departments, and agencies have their own structure and culture. At the same time, efforts are being made to integrate some of these innovations to avoid too many new notions in the world of public policing and to try to capture the overall picture (Ponsaers and Easton 2008; Scheider et al. 2009).

Around the world, this process of “translation” and “integration” is being done by organizing seminars in which attention is being paid to new concepts and evolutions in the field of policing and which are being discussed by academics and practitioners. Networks such as the Centre for Excellence in Policing and Security in Australia, the Asian Association of Police Studies, the African Security Sector Network, the UK Police Foundation, the Scottish Institute for Policing Research, The Dutch Society, Security, and Police Foundation, and the Center for Police Studies in Belgium are explicitly investing in these exchanges. An example are the efforts to explain the concept of “reassurance policing” and the link with “community policing” in order to inform police chiefs on these new evolutions. It was done during a seminar on “Reconsidering Reassurance Policing” in May 2009 organized by the Belgian Flemish Center for Police Studies in collaboration with the Dutch Society, Security, and Police Foundation and the UK Police Foundation.

The main reason why the “export” of such innovations remains quite remarkable is that there is no clear evidence on the effect the innovations have on police performance (Weisburd and Braga 2006, p. 339). “Does it work?” often remains the question which cannot always be answered on the basis of current empirical research in the field of policing. The “contrasting perspectives” on police innovations are fueled by the finding that the success of these innovations is seldom revealed due to the complex nature of police work (complex relation between outcome and effect of police work). Studies rather indicate that the standard model of policing continues to dominate the work of most public police agencies (Skogan and Frydl 2004). In other words, the public police are more likely to follow traditional police practices and models than to choose innovative approaches. Nevertheless, not everybody is that pessimistic about the public police. According to Mastrofski and Willis (2010, p. 116), generalization about change in relation to public policing is hazardous. They refer to the existing tension in academic research between the temptation to overstate the capacity of the public police to resist change and the temptation to overstate their susceptibility to change.

There is an urgent need for more (comparative) research work in this domain.

Measures of innovations and change in public policing are far less developed than that available in innovation studies of other organization types. Innovativeness studies which quantify the adopted innovations and aim at explaining why some organizations adopt more innovations than others are scarce. It has limited understanding of why some departments are more innovative than others. There is in fact some disagreement about the impact of environmental factors, on the one hand, and internal, departmental factors, on the other hand (King 2000, p. 306). Furthermore, there is certainly a gap in the diffusion studies on innovations in public policing which describe and predict the spread of an innovation or innovations across a group of adopters, over time (King 2000, pp. 303–305). In relation to public policing, these studies conclude that innovations are slowly adopted by a few departments at first, and over time, the rate of adoption increases. Larger departments tend to adopt before smaller departments (Weiss 1997).

To sum up, there is significant diversity in the content of innovations taking place. Despite this diversity and the fact that it is unclear what the effects of most innovations are on police performance, these innovations are disseminated and mimicked all over the world. Without presuming that all innovations are transferable, the question arises as to what is known about the process of managing these innovations as management is a crucial aspect of any type of dissemination. In what follows, we further elaborate on this.

The Process Of Managing Innovations In Public Policing

When Pettigrew (1992) stresses the interaction between the context, content, and process of changes, (leading) police managers are at the heart of these interactions. To learn more about the process of managing police innovation, it is interesting to have a look at process studies being done in the field of public policing in relation to some of the innovations mentioned above. Process studies explain the way in which an innovation is discovered, adopted, adapted, and employed by an organization. The study of the adoption of innovation has only recently become a subject of interest for police scholars (Skolnick and Bayley 1986; Weiss 1997).

Nevertheless, there have been few systematic studies of these processes, and scholars were generally not concerned about the emergence of innovation as a research problem when these innovations were being developed (Weisburd and Braga 2006, p. 11). As a consequence, there is remarkable little research on the innovation process or how it can be facilitated or implemented (Maguire 2009). There is likewise little systematic, cross-agency research on the extent and effectiveness of organizational change strategies in policing or on the role of police leadership in relation to these strategies (Skogan and Frydl 2004, p. 9).

There are, nonetheless, some challenges related to the management of innovation in public policing that need to be addressed. The complicated nature of this management process is related to the fact that police managers do not operate in a vacuum but find themselves in an “arena” of forces. Key players are the internal police personnel and organization, the public or the communities being policed, the politicians and the civil servants, diverse external partners of the police, and the press or media. Numerous sources of resistance and challenges are related to this “5p” complexity (Skogan 2008).

A big challenge is related to the competing demands and high expectations of the public towards the police. Because time and money is limited, the police are often unable to meet the “list” which different communities generate. Police managers need to respond to priorities with the available means and effectively communicate with the public to achieve the necessary legitimacy and support. This task is further complicated by the competing nature of the demands coming from different communities. However, it is important to note that societies are quite different in this respect. The public police are not the first point of reference for all citizens around the globe. For example, South African citizens are contacting their neighbors or private security agencies first when confronted with security problems. The public police over there are not at all the first to be called in emergencies.

Furthermore, managers in police innovation need to build public and political support. Police innovation might not be isolated to the police organization alone. The innovation must be supported by the (local, federal, regional) network of (community) agencies that influence the functioning of the police. The failure of (interagency) cooperation can be a substantial source of resistance in relation to the numerous external (state and non-state) partners the police are now expected to work with. These partners have their own view on security and well-being which might not fit the assumptions of the police innovation (Reiner 1992; Skogan 2008). However, external support can be crucial as it might help the change manager to respond to internal opposition to the innovation that has to be implemented. Taking this into account, it might be wise to invest time in the transition of innovation to successors in leadership, in the police organization, and within the governmental and community environment (Skogan 2008, p. 33).

In addition to these external contextual elements, managing innovations in public policing implies addressing the traditional internal resistance to change. Changes to established workplace cultures and practices in police organizations are difficult to generate. This is related to the nature of public police work and the structures and cultures that this has generated. This is a culture that has been called traditional or conservative as it holds on to established practices and symbolic representations of “discipline” (Marks and Fleming 2004). This hinders attempts at developing more participatory management techniques which are crucial to some of the innovations mentioned above. A culture based on “top-down command and control” is, for example, resistant to take into account critical reflections of police personnel on internal or external work-related procedures.

Furthermore, managers have to take into account that within this culture, police unions play a role in resisting innovations which include performance measurement and augmented accountability mechanisms (Reiner 1992). This may be understood from their attempt to preserve the professional discretion of the rank-and-file in the police organization. The fact that the core of the innovations cannot easily be translated into actual practices is fueling this kind of resistance. This may also be related to the fact that it is difficult to measure and reward all aspects of police work. It is, for example, easy to measure interventions at traffic incidents on the basis of police reports, but it is much more difficult to measure and reward the efforts of police to strengthen their relationships with local communities. This complicates the implementation of innovations such as community policing that include important activities which cannot always be measured (Skogan 2008).

A significant internal source of resistance, which must not be underestimated, is the rank-and-file officers. They are often asked to leave their traditional roles and meet new and high expectations for which they do not always have the necessary skills and training. These officers are quite often suspicious about new ideas that they easily call “fads” and put aside to deal with “real” police work. Furthermore, middle managers are not always enthusiastic. Empowerment of the lower ranks, for example, which is a key element in community-oriented policing, is challenging police power which is traditionally built on command and control and doing everything by the book. Managers are asked to have trust in the professionalism of their police officers and encourage the exercise of police discretion. For established managers, this is a radical change that is not always welcome (Skogan 2008, pp. 24–25).

Being aware of this kind of resistance to change, managers need to fine-tune their strategies to support their personnel depending on their stage in the adoption of the innovation. On a Gauss curve, the stages of each employee may vary from being part of the small group of “innovators” and “early adapters,” being part of the “early majority” or “late majority” which is representing most of the group to being a member of a small group of “laggards” (Rogers 1962). Reeducation might work in relation to innovators and early adopters, but most of all, persuasion strategies will be needed to get the rest going in the desired direction. In this regard, the police is far from close to the many innovators and early adapters in the world of crime and criminal organizations they are fighting against (Treverton et al. 2011).

The ultimate challenge is to incorporate new management practices into police organizations in such a way that these changes are experienced “as unremarkable as the air they breathe” (Shearing 1992 in Marks and Fleming 2004, p. 786). According to Toch (2008), reform can get considerable credibility if officers are enlisted as change agents, encouraging them to get involved in the design and implementation of change. In this line of reasoning, police unions can be considered as change agents also (Marks and Sklansky 2011). It might help if the utility function is taken into account. Police personnel, as cultural subjects, only subscribe to a certain kind of policing and policy if they also derive an individual or social added value from this (Easton and Van Ryckeghem 2010). Financial or promoting rewards for extra investments in relation to innovations can make a difference in the motivation for change. However, it is important to not allocate the innovation to a new unit within the organization or to ask people to allocate their extra overtime to the implementation of new practices (Skogan 2008, p. 27). An innovation such as community policing should be an overall strategy for the organization as a whole.

This complexity of issues and factors requires a flexible leadership style in which attention for continuity and innovation is combined. Purely instrumental (transactional) leadership will remain important to develop a working environment in which one can work effectively and efficiently. Transformational elements will be essential as well they empower people by formulating a vision and mission for the future of the police organization.

At times managers might find themselves confronted with even contradictory requirements on the organizational, strategic, and operational level of the police organization. The community policing model asks him/her to accept decentralized decision-taking, generalization as principle for labor division, a preventive orientation, a social strategy, and an open, proactive interaction with the environment. This may conflict with the demands of the military, bureaucratic model that stresses centralization, specialization, repression, and a closed system that is reactive in the interaction with the environment. Furthermore, a high degree of fragmentation in the decision-taking, specialization, a risk calculation, and contracting with consumers may be essential to implement the public-private divide model. In relation to various task environments, different police models coexist within a single police organization (Ponsaers 2001, p. 492). Police managers might find themselves “juggling” with inherently conflicting demands. This might be considered to be one of the main challenges in managing innovation in public policing.

To sum up, the challenge for police managers and leaders in the twenty-first century is to adapt their police organization to a demanding context and translate societal changes into the functioning of their organization by implementing innovations as mentioned above. The fact that different authors conceptualize, study, and measure police innovation in different ways generates different findings and makes the field of police innovation a “morass” wherein (leading) managers try to “survive.” Although managing innovations in public policing inhibits challenges that are well known in the field, there is an urgent need for more empirical research on this topic.

Conclusion And Future Research

This overview makes clear that insights on the management of public police innovations might be “lost in translation.” Firstly, innovators in policing have lent insights from public sector reform and were inspired by New Public Management. The application of the concept in the world of policing might need some further attention due to the specific nature of police work reflected in its culture and structure. Secondly, innovations tend to be captured in concepts and ideas for too long and lack a translation to practices within the police organization to be able to get implemented and radically change the functioning of the police. Thirdly, different authors conceptualize study and measure police innovation in different ways which generates different findings. It makes the empirical field of police innovation a morass and fuels a constant debate on how to manage police innovation. Fourthly, it is a challenge for academics and practitioners to develop and promote future innovations in a more integrated fashion to police. It is clear that more research is needed on the management of innovations in public policing.

Most innovation studies have not concentrated sufficiently on the dynamics behind police leadership, managerial, or tactical programs to provide understanding and/or guidance as to how these changes and innovations came about, how they were designed, what processes facilitated or hindered the finalization of project or program goals and objectives, and what outcomes were produced. The context in which such outcomes produce or fail to produce is often “black-boxed.”

There is a general absence of a body of literature that can be used to both identify the processes employed to design or implement police strategies or tactics which are part of major innovations, and the outcomes of those efforts. Simply put, policing has an oral tradition, where learning from the successes and failures of others has not been well routinized. Rather, police leaders emerge, have success and failures, and then often fall back into obscurity, without passing their learning and experience on to future generations of police leaders. This is an important conclusion for three reasons.

First, in the absence of collective understanding of environmental and institutional dynamics in policy choices and their implementation, police leaders are left to a hit-and-miss process, ill-informed by current experience and knowledge. As such police chiefs often operate with policy and tactical blind spots, often mimicking what are thought to be national trends, whether or not those trends suit the particular police agency, or community in question. Replicating the practices of larger police agencies may actually do harm to smaller agencies, where there are perhaps greater ties between the police and the community. Moreover, appearing to look innovative in mimicking larger agency practices can actually lessen police effectiveness and the legitimacy the public accords the police in smaller communities. In short, mimicking bigger is not always better. Structures and practices of small agencies remain under examined (Mastrofski and Willis 2010, p. 57).

Second, given the large gaps between academic research and police policy and decision making, police chiefs may be uninformed about “what works” and therefore must rely on institutional and programmatic myths. It may be argued that the current police research literature itself suffers from questions of validity and scientific credibility, a criticism leveled by what is known as the evidence-based policing movement. Further, it can be asserted that what are called “best practices” are often absent in police discussion and in the preparation of a new generation of police leaders. Consequently, old practices, ideologies, and routines persist. This may account for the near uniform persistence in patrol and investigative practices that have little evidence of actually working, such as general patrol and general investigations.

Third, at the tactical level, there is no body of literature that actually assesses how certain tactics were called for, designed, implemented, and which impact they generate. There are assessments of parts of these questions scattered throughout the research and program evaluation literature, but there is little coherence in broader understandings of what works, in which specific context, based on which implementation strategies (how it was made to work), or how it was supposed to work but actually failed. The exception to this statement, perhaps, is in the area of problem-solving, where there has been an attempt to provide a systematic review (see, e.g., www.popcenter.org).

This makes clear that to support the management of police innovation in the future, two kinds of investments are essential. The first is the development of “evidence-based police practices” that support leaders in managing police innovations in the implementation process and confrontation with numerous constraints related to the functioning of the public police. The second is investment in future police leaders to have the necessary attributes, skills, and knowledge to manage it all. These investments can help future leaders to play a role in managing police innovation and translate broader societal transformations (sociological, economic, political, technological, etc.) into the functioning of the police organization of tomorrow taking into account its own character.

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