Validating the Selection of Deputy Marshals

Leader Behavior in a Police Command Bureaucracy: A Closer Look at the Quasi-Military Model

“…On a related point of interest, John Van Maanen (1978 c) has noted that qualitative probes of police organization have frequently emphasized the discretionary, not military, features of police work. 4. prefer a highly directive, structure-providing leadership style (Trojanowicz, 1971;Leiren, 1973;Walther, McCune, and Trojanowicz, 1973 Thus, even though some of the dysfunctions of the command bureaucracy have appeared in the writings on police (Myren, 1960;Wilson, 1967;Manning, 1971;Sandier and Mintz, 1974;Van Maanen, 1974;Moore, 1976;Cordner, 1978), the basic assumption that police organizations must be quasi-military in nature has not been challenged empirically. Descriptions of police officers' strong need for psychological structure, and their legitimation of the obedience ethos, have made the command bureaucracy image seem both descriptive of and well-suited to police work.…”

Psychological Attributes of Policemen: A Review of Research and Opinion

“…In some of those studies they score as less authoritarian than various civilian groups (including college stu-dents and teachers, as well as, more appropriately, lower middle class or working class men). Conversely, the use of a variety of other clinical and psychiatric techniques has shown policemen to be rather impulsive risk takers, prone to act out their impulses in physical aggression (Danish & Brodsky, 1970;Rhead et al, 1968) or to project their aggressiveness onto others as self-justifications (Mills, 1969); markedly self-assertive and concerned with maintaining a virile self-image while at the same time somewhat lacking in self-confidence and preferring to be supervised-as well as preferring to supervise others-in a highly directive manner (Leiren, 1973;Matarazzo et al, 1964;Trojanowicz, 1971;Walther, McCune, &Trojanowicz, 1973); and more rigid, far more punitive, and more easily influenced by a status figure than comparison groups (Carlson et al, 197 1 ;Marshall & Mansson, 1966). However, although highly assertive, they do not respond with above-average forcefulness to the aggression of others (Trojanowicz, 1971;Walther et al, 1973), and the aggression and impulsivity observed in the above studies were specifically noted by several of the authors to be nonpathological.…”

Conceptual issues in the development of police selection procedures.

“…Additionally, because the officers participate in a relatively standardized program, there is less confounding situational variance. The most obvious disadvantage to criteria generated in the academy is that there is no assurance that such results are generalizable to street performance (Leiren, 1973). It may be that some data available in the training academy can serve as useful predictors (Azen, Snibbe, Montgomery, Fabricatore, & Earle, 1974).…”

“…The second set of criteria is based on the notion that those who survive the rigors of training and/or the stress of the job are to some degree more able than those who fail (Levy, 1967(Levy, ,1973. Defining the criterion as job survival may be operationally simple and economically sound (training an officer who is likely to resign is expensive), but such a criterion may be inadequate in terms of selecting the best potential officers.…”

“…Simply put, if predictive variables are chosen on their ability to predict adaptation to a restrictive environment, then the selection process will perpetuate the abortive adaptation process. Particularly disquieting in this regard are the data that indicate that brighter and/or more highly educated recruits were more likely to terminate their careers (Levy, 1967(Levy, , 1973Stoddard, 1973).…”