ABSTRACT
Internal Politics, the Police Chief, and Police Officer Empowerment At a University of California conference on police empowerment in the fall of 2006, participants focused on how to empower and engage police officers in a process of shared leadership and community policing. One of the conference speakers, Wesley G. Skogan, offered the following comments in a conference paper:
It is necessary to be clear-eyed about the difficulties of innovating in police organizations. Because of widespread enthusiasm for innovations such as community policing among academics and the informed public, it could appear that reform comes easily. In fact, it is hard, the political risks involved are considerable, and efforts to change the police often fall far short or fail. Discussions of policing reform also often feature modern management terms such as employee empowerment. This also makes senior managers very nervous. They worry about laziness, corruption, racial profiling, and excessive force, and they do not trust rank-and-file officers on any of those.1
