Police administration - Essay Example

In addition, the paper explores whether the course has helped me, in preparing to face the modern-day challenges facing the police. The main challenges facing the police force include governance. For a long time, the tripartite structure of the force that encompasses a home office, chief constable and police authority is largely non-operational. The structure is characterized by gross confusion over the roles that different policing agents should play; there is a replication of roles and responsibilities.

Therefore, there is a need to address the inconsistencies in the governance of the force (VanHulle, 2011). For instance, the bureaucratic nature of the current police structure needs to be addressed with an aim of effective utility of the potential in the police force. There is also an issue with the skills and the expertise held by the different departments, which needs to be explored, and where possible consolidated in order to ensure the achievement of maximum value from the available personnel (VanHulle, 2011).

The satisfaction expected in the area of police governance includes coherence of command, which eliminates the availability of conflicts in orders and commands. Furthermore, satisfaction in this area will include the delivery of services in a way that ensures that confusion levels are low (VanHulle, 2011). Through the adoption of an effective police administration, there will be the avoidance of replication of roles and responsibilities. In effect, this establishes a reward system that recognizes the roles of all officers regardless of their rank.

There is a challenge of cost cuts in instances where the police force is under pressure to show that they are operating in a financially efficient manner (COPS, 2011). One possible solution, in this case, would be investing in a common procurement and a common service administration model. Some of the cuts that may help in realizing this include the sharing of resources and using smarter volume purchasing. For instance, instead of the 43 forces having 43 HR centers, they could invest in a central HR administration (COPS, 2011).

Price cuts could also be realized in the areas of procuring services and equipment as central procuring could reduce the overall cost of policing, by millions. The satisfaction expected from this challenging area is that the operations of the police force should be managed and administered in a professional manner. Furthermore, the deployment of funds and roles should be based on the strategic employment of resources – both human and financial (COPS 2011). There is a challenge that the police are expected to depict a reduction in crime, which could be realized through increasing the detection of crime at all areas of coverage.

The changing nature of crimes, where new models and styles of crimes replace the existing ones, further escalates this problem. In effect, this calls for newer models to detect crime and realize the overall objective of crime reduction (PERF, 2012). For instance, there is a need to improve stitching on instances where criminal activities of small or large magnitude can be investigated with the criminals subsequently subjected to penal action (PERF, 2012). The satisfaction expected in this area is that the police should remain updated on new patterns and the technologies used by criminals.

For example, police investigations should be able to expose information –