ABSTRACT
The terminology used in the literature that relates to police agencies undertaking organizational reform or restructuring in order to decrease costs or to improve service delivery effectiveness is extremely confusing. This confusion is compounded when comparing American policing literature with international literature as a number of American researchers use the terms “consolidation,” “amalgamation,” “merger,” “regionalization,” and “integration” interchangeably or for specific forms of organizational reform. In one American example, researchers (Wilson, Weiss, & Grammich, 2012) defined consolidation as the merging of the local police and fire department to form one local emergency agency. In comparison, researchers in the United Kingdom used the term “consolidation” to refer to the merging of agencies that provide the same function, for example, policing (the merging of two police agencies) (Loveday, 2007). The discussion throughout this book will use the term “consolidation” in relation to the merging and reform of police agencies only.
