Evidence-based policing: The impact of organizational context and leadership on programmatic adoption

This chapter has three aims and each supports police leaders who are trying to improve their organization's accountability through evidence-based policies and practices and to achieve the organizational goals and outcomes that are within their mandate. The first aim is to help police leaders recognize that all contemporary policing models are information and knowledge intensive and that police leaders cannot effectively make significant organizational reforms towards evidence-based policing (EBP) policies and practices without firstly understanding their organization's unique mediating and contextual factors. The second aim is to explore three key mediating factors that are unique to each police organization and that can have either a positive or negative impact on the achievement of desired organizational outcomes: organizational culture, processes and technologies. To illustrate the mediating role of organizational culture on the achievement of organizational outcomes recent research on the choice of rank and file officers to share or not share information and knowledge within and across organizations will be used. The third aim is to underscore how critically important police leadership, at all levels of the organization, is to the success of knowledge and information-intensive policing models like EBP but also to police professionalism. This chapter concludes by making practical recommendations for the implementation of EBP policies and practice and highlights the significant EBP advances that have been made in recent years and the resources that are currently available to police leaders around the world.