Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have gained popularity in recent years. However, many minimize the complexity of this transparency initiative and elevate the potential benefits. While BWCs can promote police accountability, they may also reduce citizen trust in police organizations. For BWCs to achieve win-win solutions, police organizations should determine the level of citizen support for specific BWC practices. However, measuring citizen support presents several challenges. Social desirability may impact polling results, as participants underreport responses they perceive to be outside the norm. The authors employ a list experiment design to measure true citizen support for BWC practices. They find statistically significant levels of social desirability for police discretion in the activation of BWCs and for restriction of footage accessibility regarding suspects with mental illness. Decision makers should not rely on public opinion polls as a gauge of true citizen support for BWC use.
Evidence for Practice• Citizens remain skeptical about giving police officers discretion in turning on police body-worn cameras. • Public polling may overestimate the level of support citizens have for police body-worn cameras. • Police body-worn camera initiatives are more complex than frequently portrayed.
One of the main practical recommendations from the copious public service motivation literature is that human resources (HR) professionals should use public service motivation (PSM) to assist in selecting candidates for public service jobs. To test if PSM is indeed attractive to HR professionals in selecting applicants to work in the public sector, 238 HR managers recruited from the International Public Management Association for Human Resources rated three cover letters and then rated themselves about PSM and the Big 5 personality traits. The cover letters were randomized on most likely combinations of PSM and Big 5, revealed in earlier research. Our results are that real HR professionals did not rate cover letters more highly when they displayed aspects of PSM.
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AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to better understand the performance improvement outcomes that result from the interaction of a performance regime and its context over more than a decade. Design/methodology/approach -A series of partial free disposable hull analyses are performed to graph variations in performance for 13 services in 444 municipalities in one province for over a decade. Findings -There are few examples of mass service improvements over time. This holds even for relative bottom performers, as they do not catch up to average municipalities over time. However, there is also little proof of service deterioration during the same period. Research limitations/implications -A limitation results from the high churning rate of the indicators. The relevance of refining indicators based on feedback from practitioners should not be dismissed, even if it makes the task of proving performance improvement more difficult. It is possible that the overall quality of services on the ground improved, or stayed stable despite diminishing costs, without stable indicators to capture that reality. Practical implications -Not all arrangements incentives and structures ofperformance regimesare equally fruitful for one level of government to steer a multitude of other governments on the generalized path to improved performance. Social implications -With the insight that was not available to public managers putting together these performance regimes in the beginning of the 2000s, the authors offer a proposition: mass performance improvement is not to be expected out of intelligence regime. It neither levels nor improves performance for all (Knutsson et al., 2012). Though there are benefits to such a regime, a general rise in performance across all participants is not one of them. Originality/value -Performance improvements are assessed under difficult, yet common characteristics in the public sector: budgetary realities where there are trade-offs between many 105 Performance improvement, culture, and regimes Downloaded by University of Mississippi At 00:41 22 June 2015 (PT) services, locally set priorities, no clear definition of what constitutes a good level of performance, and chang...
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