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From community to intelligence: executive realignment of RCMP mission.

Article Excerpt
Introduction

In December 2000, the RCMP's commissioner announced the operational adoption of intelligence-led policing. This step represented a shift in executive discourse away from the earlier decade's emphasis on community policing adoption. Despite their efforts to gain broad acceptance for community policing by aligning training and management, executives were unable to integrate the community and garner organizational support for empowerment. Nevertheless, the development of problem-oriented training and management--a political emphasis on organized forms of crime--and the existence of an alternative policing model that better aligned with these developments allowed executives to move away from the organization's community-policing mission.

Since 2001, executives have recognized and addressed minor misalignments between intelligence-led and community policing: the national community-policing policy centre has focused its research and analysis on organized crime, and the strategic priority on restorative-justice programs has been de-emphasized. However, recognition of broader misalignments may be inevitable. Recent U.K. studies by Cope (2004) and Maguire and John (2006) indicate significant front-line misunderstanding as a result of inadequate training. Moreover, the IACP and RCMP executive have already begun to identify the challenges posed to the intelligence-led ideal by the existence of copious and multifaceted information. As with community policing then, problems of buy-in/resistance and misalignments in the areas of training and management are likely to develop and persist.

This study begins with a discussion of the ways in which executives problematized the RCMP's lack of progress in adopting community policing as the result of fundamental misalignments. In the broadest sense, misalignment refers to incongruities between existing and desired management practices, mindsets, and technologies vis-a-vis mission. The paper then explores how executives attempted to foster front-line acceptance of community policing through realignment in training and mid-management during the latter half of the 1990s. While these steps did lead to significant change, they fell short of their goals. This article goes on to show how the development of intelligence-led policing in the U.K. presented executives with not only a viable alternative, but one that also potentially offered greater discursive alignment with their accomplishments. The subsequent analysis of intelligence-led policing from an organizational alignment perspective leads to a proposal and discussion of a cyclical explanation of how new police missions are adopted (albeit one requiring further exploration and refinement). Finally, broader conclusions are offered based on the implications of this study on police (and governmental) expertise and knowledge production.

Community policing and the RCMP

Perspectives on community policing include criticisms that community policing is nothing more than a buzz phrase (Manning 1984; Ross 1995); a perception that it encompasses a set of relations programs that encourage public cooperation with the police (Murphy and Muir 1985); and a point of view that it is a consultative public policing philosophy rooted in partnerships between an empowered public and police that aims to resolve social problems that underpin crime (Normandeau and Leighton 1990; Roberg and Kuykendall 1993; Trojanowicz 1990). For the RCMP, all of these interpretations may have applied to some extent during the 1980s and 1990s. However, executive discourse evolved from mere rhetoric during the early 1980s, to emphasis on relations-building programs by the late 1980s, to emphasis on adoption of a national service-delivery philosophy by the mid-1990s.

Since community policing as a consultative philosophy represents a rather dramatic departure from the professional law-enforcement model, it comes as no surprise that its implementation in public police agencies is correlated with significant organizational restructuring. As Clark (2000), Murphy (1998), and Wood (2000) have shown, in the 1990s police organizations were decentralized through divisional regionalization and front-line empowerment, greater fiscal accountability at all levels, and implementation of the "continuous learning organization." Furthermore, de Lint (1997; 1998) found that police training emphasized the continuous development of client-centred problem-solving and policing "competencies." Drawing on Enteman (1993) and McLaughlin and Murji (1995), de Lint suggested that this transformation is fully consistent with an overall embrace of "new managerialism" among Western police departments. The RCMP was no exception to this restructuring blitz in the 1990s.

Problematizations of community policing

Between 1994 and 1995, exacerbating a decade of gradual budgetary declines, the RCMP was forced to cut nearly $175 million from its operating budget, leading to the elimination of nearly 10% of its workforce (Conference Board of Canada 2000). Fiscal pressure was coupled with a realization within the executive that despite its attempt to adopt community policing since 1989 (in part to resolve some of the organization's fiscal problems by better targeting operational resources), progress had been very limited. An internal review of community policing in the fall of 1994 reported,

The implementation process has not been entirely without its problems. There have been some failures, deficiencies and obstacles along the way, such as internal bureaucracy, poor communication, member resistance, community apathy, lack of training and the paternalistic culture of the RCMP. The RCMP put the cart before the horse, by requiring the members to change the way they provide service to the public, without first addressing the paramilitary culture, bureaucratic structure and response to call philosophy of the Force. (Johnson 1994: 2)

The need to address both the fiscal crisis and the lack of progress toward community policing translated into a strong executive will to align training and management in...