Second, the organization must have both sufficient resources and suitable operating programs to accomplish the desired results. If mandated purposes cannot be achieved, then the organization will have failed to produce the results that justify public backing. Support and legitimacy will wither; the organization will become "bankrupt."
Given that successful management requires coherent and operationally feasible policy mandates, a review of the mandates and capabilities of police departments will reveal why managing large urban police departments is, in principle, impossible.
Impossibility begins with inconsistent objectives. Not every objective for which the police are held accountable can be maximized simultaneously.
The Tension between Cost and Output
Of course, every managerial job involves some conflict in objectives. For example, all managers are expected to deliver the maximum quantity and quality of services at the minimum cost. In principle, they cannot do this; something must give. Police managers confront this problem every time a city administration charges them to maintain response times to citizens' calls at current levels despite increasing demands and diminishing staff resources.
Ordinarily, this tension between maximizing performance and minimizing cost is resolved by holding managers accountable for maximizing the difference between costs and the value of the services they provide-what is measured by the private sector's "bottom line." In the public sector, it is usually called "efficiency" or "productivity." In effect, managers are held accountable for the net value of their organization's efforts.
"Net value maximization" provides a conceptual resolution of the intrinsic tension between maximizing output and minimizing cost in both private and public sectors. In the private sector, where the value of the organization's output can readily be measured, this conceptual solution has much practical bite. Unfortunately, it works less well in the public sector. The reason is simply that it is often hard even to define, much less measure, the value of public sector operations.2 Indeed, managers find it difficult to calculate the quantity and quality of public sector activities, let alone the value of outcomes that occur much further down a chain of causation and that would serve ultimately to justify the public sector efforts. For example, the police can measure the speed of their response to calls for service but not the quality of the service rendered by the responding officer, and they have no way of knowing whether the fast responses succeed in controlling crime or stilling citizens' fears.
In the absence of good measurements of the value of organizational outputs, the efficiency of a public sector organization is often determined by performance standards or professionally agreed-upon rules about how an organization should be structured and operated. For example, a professional association might conclude that an excellent police department is one that can keep its response time under five minutes for priority-one calls; or, that an excellent police department is functionally organized, as a freestanding police academy and a forensic unit, and requires all its employees to have a college degree. Such standards set useful benchmarks, but they are always susceptible to both criticism and change. Consequently, public sector managers are nearly always vulnerable to assertions that they are "inefficient" in the production of a given service.
The police have a diverse and complicated mission that includes controlling street crime, equipping themselves to deal with sophisticated criminal organizations and special crime problems, deciding when crime control objectives are advanced more effectively by not enforcing the law, figuring out ways to prevent crime as well as control it, deciding whether and how to deal with the separate issue of fear in addition to criminal victimization, and judging whether their emergency service role is a valuable addition to or a distraction from their basic functions. In accomplishing these purposes, they are obligated to use the resources entrusted to them-money and authority-both economically and fairly.
On an analytic level, these different objectives need not be inconsistent. All the society has to do is write out an explicit function statement that defines the rates at which it is willing to grant money and authority to achieve the diverse objectives of controlling different kinds of crime, keeping the peace (rather than enforcing the law), preventing crime, reducing fear, and providing emergency medical and social services through police departments. As a practical matter, a coherent organization might be constructed that could produce fairly high levels of performance on all these different goals. In fact, most police departments do perform all these functions reasonably well.
Yet any political agreement that specifies the trade-offs among these competing objectives is by nature both general and fickle. As a result, for the most part, the police operate with diverse responsibilities whose relative importance is never clearly expressed. Moreover, an analytic solution does not abolish the sensation, keenly felt by those in the organization, that the police department is going in too many different directions. They experience the tension of unresolved priorities in at least three respects.
First, the different enterprises seem to vie for resources. When the police are pursuing one set of goals, there is the perception that resources are unavailable for other purposes. Second, the various goals compete for the soul of the organization. An organization devoted to law enforcement against violent offenders has a much different culture than an organization devoted to preventing crime, reducing fear, or providing emergency medical and social services. The inconsistencies show up, not in operating shortfalls in one function or another, but in the orientation, training, and psychological commitment of officers.
Third, the key measures of performance and success depend on mission focus. Some organizations stand or fall on arrests and levels of reported crime. Others are judged by the levels of victimization and the quality of the relationship between the police and the community. The volume of community services supplied is yet another criterion. Although it might be desirable to measure all of these things, the need to avoid complexity narrows the organization's attention to a few measurements, and it is in choosing ways of measuring success that the different goals prove inconsistent.
