Evolving Strategy of Policing: Case Studies of Strategic Change

Orlando W. Wilson was the most important police leader of the 20th century. His thinking and writing singularly dominated policing from the 1940s through the 1970s. His mentor, August Vollmer, may achieve similar status in the future, since his practice, as against his later writings, was prescient of many of the late 20th century trends in policing. Vollmer’s patrol officers as “chiefs of their beats,” “college cops” (the majority of his officers were either college graduates or in college), and his “Friday crab club” meetings (meetings of off-duty officers to discuss their work with him and their peers) were the first stirrings of genuine professionalism in policing. What Vollmer practiced, however, was a road not taken by policing, at least until the 1980s with the development of community policing.

0. W. Wilson’s preeminence is based on his practical, creative, and original thinking and his ability to put that thinking into clear and precise writing. His texts on police administration and on planning became the standards of the field, used in generations of training, education, and civil service examinations. No other book on policing was as influential as Poke Administration in its various editions in shaping policing’s basic strategy.

During the era dominated by 0. W. Wilson and his colleaguesy roughly the 1920s through the 1970s, police departments shifted from being an integral part of urban political machines with a broad service mandate, to autonomous “professional” organizations narrowly focused on “serious” crime. Allied with the Progressives, reformers struggled to extricate policing at all levels from the influence of late 19th and early 20th century urban politics. In doing so, they developed a strategy of police that emphasized bureaucratic autonomy, efficiency, and internal accountability through command and control systems.

The business of police was serious crime as defined by the Uniform Crime Reports (developed by Wilson’s colleagues under the auspices of the International Association of Chief of Police). The organizational structure and administrative processes of police departments were patterned after the classical models developed by Frederick Taylor, the great organizational theorist of the early 20th Century.

The methods for dealing with serious crime included criminal investigation, random preventive patrol by automobile, and rapid response to calls for service. 0. W. Wilson emerged as the primary architect of both the administrative/organizational and tactical elements of this strategy. His administrative texts, conceived and written during the 1940s and 1950s, remained basic police lore until well into the 1980s.

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http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/198029.pdf

California Police Officers

March 23, 2008 (San Dimas, CA) Police-Writers.com is a website that lists state and local police officers who have written books. The website added three police officers from California.

Seth Goldstein was a police officer for the Berkeley Police Department for 13 years. During his time with the Berkeley Police Department he served in Patrol, Service and the Detective Division. On the Berkeley Police Department, Seth Goldstein worked for two years as a juvenile officer. Seth Goldstein is the Executive Director of the Child Abuse Forensic Institute, which he founded in 1992. The Institute assists parents in Family Law, Juvenile, and Personal Injury matters wherein child abuse allegations have arisen.

Seth Goldstein is the author of The Sexual Exploitation of Children: A Practical Guide to Assessment, Investigation, and Intervention and Investigating Child Sexual Exploitation: Law Enforcement's Role; and, the co-author of Raising Safe Kids in an Unsafe World: 30 Simple Ways to Prevent Your Child from Being Lost, Abducted, or Abused.

According to the book description of The Sexual Exploitation of Children: A Practical Guide to Assessment, Investigation, and Intervention, the “Second Edition discusses the new and different developments in the manifestation of problems involved in investigation and assessment of sexual cases and offers advice on dealing with these issues. This updated and completely revised handbook guides anyone who needs to investigate or assess child sexual abuse allegations through the essential steps of enquiry.”

Samuel Chapman has served as a Berkeley Police Department police officer, a police consultant, an assistant professor in the School of Police Administration at Michigan State University, and as undersheriff of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland, Oregon. In 1965 he was named assistant director of President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement Administration and Justice.

After the 1967 report, Samuel Chapman was appointed professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma in the Police Administration Program, where he served for 24 years. Samuel Chapman is an expert on police use of deadly force and the use of canine units. Samuel G. Chapman is the author, co-author or editor of ten books: Police Dogs in North America; Cops, Killers and Staying Alive: The Murder of Police Officers in America; Police Patrol: Operations and Management; Police Administration: A Critical Study of Police Organizations in the United States and Abroad; Police Patrol Readings; An Analysis of Assaults on Police Officers in Forty-Six Cities; A Descriptive Profile of the Assault Incident; Dogs in Police Work in Oklahoma; Introduction and Methodology to the Study of Police Assaults in the South Central United States; Police Murders and Effective Countermeasures.

Andrew O'Hara is a retired California Highway Patrol patrolman who spent much of his boyhood and career in the Sacramento Valley. He is the author of The Swan: Tales of the Sacramento Valley. According to the book description, “Much has been written about the rich history of the Sacramento Valley - the Gold Rush of 1849, Sutter's Fort, the Donner Party and the Pony Express. The Swan" brings you tales inspired by the people who live in the valley today: their dreams, their hopes and loves, their weaknesses and their personal tragedies. Beginning with two children who meet in a field under the stars to face life and death together, author Andrew O'Hara explores how ordinary people face extraordinary challenges with quiet determination and unseen heroism.”

Police-Writers.com now hosts 890 police officers (representing 385 police departments) and their 1867 police books in 32 categories, there are also listings of United States federal law enforcement employees turned authors, international police officers who have written books and civilian police personnel who have written books.