Exploring Officer Perceptions of Community-Oriented Policing on a University Campus

Date of Award

5-5-2024

Degree Name

Ed.D. in Leadership for Organizations

Department

Department of Educational Administration

Advisor/Chair

Greg Smith

Abstract

The profession of policing with its homogenous norms and strict organizational hierarchy faces ongoing scrutiny and calls for change. Midwestern University’s police department (UPD) has maintained that community-oriented policing (COP) is a major tenet of its mission and vision. The operationalization of that tenet has proven elusive to UPD’s administration and this issue has been exacerbated by profession-wide concerns related to recruitment, retention, and legitimacy within the community at large. This study explored whether and how the perceptions of individual officers of their social identity roles within the organization’s hierarchy might affect their ability to engage in a nontraditional policing model like COP and its associated initiatives. This study used purposeful sampling limited to Midwestern University police officers because of the unique nature of university policing and the necessity COP creates for a police department to link to its community. All officers were invited to participate in an anonymous survey and certain officers and supervisors were invited to participate in semi-structured individual interviews based upon their years of service with UPD. The collected quantitative survey data underwent correlative analysis and the one significant finding showed that an officers’ overall job satisfaction is positively correlated to their attitudes toward COP in their own department and that officers newer to UPD held more favorable COP attitudes. Qualitative data collected from the seven personal interviews underwent thematic analysis in which the themes of COP-related perceptions, communication, and the evolution of policing emerged. In considering the findings as a whole, the personal anecdotes and experiences with COP shared by the interviewed participants newer to UPD demonstrated a more positive perception of COP and working at UPD than those with longer tenure. Thus, the qualitative findings supported the correlation and trend found by the quantitative analysis. These findings were important because the themes that emerged from the qualitative data shed light on the critical groundwork UPD would need to do as it endeavors to enact major organizational changes within the department. These themes assisted in the development of an action plan that, once implemented, will provide UPD officers with a voice in the department’s progress and skills to apply to ongoing and future strategic initiatives.

Keywords

community-oriented policing, university policing, nontraditional policing, hierarchical organizational change, action research

Rights Statement

Copyright 2024, author

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