Measuring police innovation: issues and measurement

This paper investigates conceptual and empirical issues in the study of police organizational innovation. In particular, previous studies of police innovation have rarely created measures of innovation that are in accord with established methods and theory employed in innovation studies of other organization types. To mitigate this oversight, this paper first describes four relevant issues in organizational innovation, and applies these issues to create a fivefold measure of police innovation with data on the 431 largest municipal US police departments. Second, the components of this fivefold typology of police innovation are factor analyzed, to assess their unidimensionality. The results of these analyses indicate that three of the five innovation types are, in themselves, multi‐dimensional. Overall, police innovations do not adhere to the five innovation types suggested by theories of organizational innovation. Instead, the multi‐dimensionality of police organizational innovation is demonstrated here.