Dilemmas of Police Administration

POLICY MAKING FOR THE POLICE is complicated by the fact that, at least in large cities, the police department is an organization with at least two objectives, one of which produces conflict and the other of which cannot be attained.' The dilemmas facing police administrators arise out of their inability to obtain agreement on what constitutes satisfactory performance of the first objective, and their difficulty in finding a strategy which would permit the realization of the (agreed-upon) second objective. (There are, of course, additional objectives which a police department servesproviding certain nonpolice services and handling large-scale disorders, for example. The former is treated in some detail in the article by Herman Goldstein in this symposium.)