Frontline Innovation in Times of Crisis: Learning from the Corona Virus Pandemic

Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic brings about dramatic challenges for frontline police officers and their organizations. This will, we argue, likely have two implications for frontline learning and innovation. First, the pandemic will surely occasion a surge of frontline improvisation and innovation in police organizations responding to the crisis as the experienced needs for new solutions dramatically increase. Secondly, but equally importantly, this wave of frontline innovation is likely to be more transparent than is typically the case for innovations developed in frontline police work, because of changes in formal mandates and informal tolerance for procedural deviance. At this moment of unusually widespread and transparent frontline innovation, we propose an approach to capturing and diffusing this frontline innovation. By taking seriously the unique dynamics of frontline innovation, such an approach is likely to capture valuable innovations that might otherwise rapidly dissipate and be lost.

Policing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploratory Study of the Types of Organizational Changes and Police Activities Across the Globe

“…Although police agencies have emphasized different aspects of change in adapting to the pandemic, a common theme was changed to the internal organization (e.g., suspending in-person training and recruitment, adjusting roll calls, limiting access to buildings, encouraging remote work, physical distancing, and reassigning officers). The issue of police changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been addressed in numerous countries, including Australia (e.g., Drew & Martin, 2020), Brazil (Matarazzo et al, 2020), Canada (Jones, 2020), Denmark (Hartmann & Hartmann, 2020), Peru (Hernandez-Vasquez & Azanedo, 2020), United Kingdom (Reicher & Stott, 2020; Stott et al, 2020), United States (Jennings & Perez, 2020; Kugler et al, 2021; Papazoglou et al, 2020; White & Fradella, 2020), and Vietnam (Luong et al, 2020).…”

Hiding practices in employee-user innovation

“…They could, like other innovative users, possess "sticky" knowledge of possible innovative solutions and the systems-of-use in which those solutions would need to function (von Hippel, 1994;. Employees with lead-user characteristics might also be very efficient in developing innovations (Hienerth et al, 2014) that might be valuable also to other users (Franke et al, 2006;Hartmann and Hartmann, 2020). For that value to manifest and the organization to benefit substantively from an innovation developed by an employee-user, innovations need to diffuse beyond the individual innovator (De Jong et al, 2022b).…”

Mapping Cyber-Enabled Crime: Understanding Police Investigations and Prosecutions of Cyberstalking

“…While Manning (1992), Chan (2001) and Brayne (2020) suggest frontline police resist change and innovation, Maskály, Ivković and Neyroud (2021) and Hartmann and Hartmann (2020) found the opposite. They suggest that a strength of frontline officers is that they are adaptive to new policies and systems, especially as they are likely to be younger and more open to technological change than their older peers and supervisors.…”