A comparative study of police organizational changes during the COVID-19 pandemic: responding to public health crisis or something else?

Abstract

Police organizations—like many other social institutions—were forced to make changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This exploratory study uses data from 28 countries to examine how the strength of the pandemic (e.g. infection rates and death rates) and governmental restrictions are related to these changes. The analyses of the data suggest the way in which police organizations responded to the pandemic was complicated. Infection rates are generally not as strongly related to changes as are death rates. Governmental restrictiveness is strongly related to some changes. Additional research is needed to tease out additional factors that potentially explain these changes as well as multivariate effects of these factors.

A Global Study of Police Administrators’ Perceptions of the Effectiveness of Organizational Changes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…However, as other research has shown, senior police leader intuitive perceptions of effectiveness have been historically problematic. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maskály et al ( 2021a , 2021b ) reported that police administrators—often unwarrantedly—provide a rosy perception of the potential effects of the organizational and operational changes made in response to the pandemic. Ergo, it could well be that the administrators' perceptions of effectiveness are equally overly optimistic.…”

“…The effect of COVID-19 on proactive problem-solving and community-policing activities seems to be quite strong; over 80% of the countries in the study by Maskály et al ( 2021a , 2021b ) reported completely changing how they delivered these services. Similarly, Alexander and Ekici ( 2020 ) found that over 80% of the police agencies in their Illinois survey lessened their community-policing activities.…”

“…Some of the immediate reactions to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic included an increased reliance on personal protective equipment (PPE) and a provision of (re)training and instructions to the police officers on using the PPE use, as well as on maintaining social distancing during the police-citizen contacts (e.g., Maskály et al, 2021a , 2021b ). The most common forms of PPE issued by the North American police agencies were face masks, gloves, and disinfectants (Lum et al, 2020b ).…”

“…To protect their employees as they go about fulfilling their tasks, police agencies reacted to the pandemic as well (e.g., Alexander & Ekici, 2020 ; Lum et al, 2020a ; Maskály et al, 2021a , 2021b ; Warren et al, 2020 ). They not only distributed personal protective equipment (PPE) to their employees and (re)trained them on how to use it but also developed methods of reducing the risk of exposure to COVID-19 by limiting police interactions and police-citizen interactions.…”

“…These changes seem to be organizational (e.g., in-person training and roll-calls or briefings were abolished) and operational (e.g., in-person community policing was discouraged, self-initiated police activities were minimized; Alexander & Ekici, 2020 ; Lum et al, 2020a ; Maskály et al, 2021a ; Warren et al, 2020 ). Extant research (e.g., Alexander & Ekici, 2020 ; Lum et al, 2020a ; Maskály et al, 2021a , 2021b ) primarily focused on capturing the nature and extent of these changes across various police agencies, but the question of how effective police executives perceived these changes were at protecting their staff remains unanswered.…”