Organizational Decline and Fiscal Distress in Municipal Police Agencies

Abstract

In late 2007, the United States entered one of the most significant recessions in recent memory. While the consequences to individuals have been well documented, less attention has been paid to the effects on state-sponsored organizations such as police agencies. The current study examines fiscal distress (e.g., layoffs, hiring freezes) in a sample of large municipal law enforcement agencies. According to a framework proposed by Levine, departments should be most vulnerable to fiscal distress when the jurisdiction experiences economic shocks (environmental entropy), the demand for police services declines (problem depletion), the political system becomes less supportive of police agencies (political vulnerability), and the organization becomes more structurally complex (organizational atrophy). Structural equation modeling results suggest that fiscal distress is driven by the local economic context, changing crime rates, and organizational size. This research has implications for helping organizations address future economic declines.

Police discretion, organizational characteristics, and traffic stops: An analysis of racial disparity in illinois

“…The 2013 edition of the LEMAS is currently the most recent, and contains responses from 133 agencies in Illinois. Many studies that have examined organizational characteristics of police agencies have used the LEMAS (Burruss and Giblin, 2014; Eitle et al, 2014; Giblin and Nowacki, 2018; Hickman and Piquero, 2009; Nowacki and Willits, 2018; Willits, 2014; Willits and Nowacki, 2014; 2016), often merged with other databases. We use the LEMAS to construct our organizational variables.…”

“…Characteristics of police agencies can also serve as sources of disparity. A growing body of research has examined how organizational characteristics affect a variety of policing outcomes, including police innovation (Katz et al, 2002; Morabito, 2010; Nowacki and Willits, 2018; Roberts et al, 2012; Willits and Nowacki, 2016), police misconduct (Eitle et al, 2014), use of deadly force (Nowacki, 2015; Willits and Nowacki, 2014), citizen complaints (Hickman and Piquero, 2009), assaults against police officers (Willits 2014), organizational decline (Giblin and Nowacki, 2018), officer compensation (Giblin and Galli, 2017), and militarization (Koslicki and Willits, 2018). Few studies have extended this branch of organizational research to traffic enforcement.…”

Social media and the police

“…This valuable data set has been used by many researchers to study police organizational structure and related topics (e.g. Giblin and Nowacki, 2018; Nowacki and Willits, 2018; Willits and Nowacki, 2016; Willits, 2014). The LEMAS data set has been identified as the second most frequently used data set in the criminal justice discipline (Matusiak et al , 2014).…”

An organizational approach to understanding police response to cybercrime

“…Variables that reflect organizational context generally fall into four categories: size, age, technology/task orientation, and social and political environment. Prior studies of police organizations have found that department size is related to a range of outcomes including misconduct reports (Eitle et al, 2014), style of policing (Morabito, 2010), use of technology (Nowacki and Willits, 2018), terrorism preparedness (Roberts et al, 2012), fiscal distress (Giblin and Nowacki, 2018) and deadly force (Willits and Nowacki, 2014).…”