ABSTRACT

The quote above is an apt description of administrators’ efforts to control the behavior of street-level officers. Police chiefs provide both administrative and moral leadership for their departments. A chief, to survive and flourish as the head of his or her organization, must acquire the loyalty of the rank and file (Bordua & Reiss, 1986). He or she is expected to be moral leader on issues of departmental responsibility and the ethical behavior of their officers, as well as to provide managerial leadership on administrative and command tasks. Yet the reasons for which chiefs were hired are often intimately tied to the reasons for which they will be ultimately removed-an inability to control line officers’ behavior. In spite of a variety of efforts to control line-level behavior over the past century, accountability problems persist. Executives often find that they are a step behind what their officers are doing on the streets.