Improving Performance Appraisal and Evaluation

Sergeant Tina Thompson is a veteran of the police department and was promoted to sergeant of Unit Baker 3. Unit Baker 3 is supervising COPS. COPS is community oriented police program. There are many differences between a police officer and a community police officer. Although sergeant Tina Thompson is a 12 year of the police department, she comes from a background of police officer work not community oriented police officers. Sergeant Tina Thompson’s job is evaluate her subordinates and she is aware that it is a lot different that police officers evaluation as the job are different. It is Sergeant Tina Thompsons job to create a job description, compare and contrast the difference between police officers and community police officers as well as evaluate each of her subordinates.

Community policing is defined as “a law enforcement philosophy that allows officers to continuously operate in the same area in order to create a stronger bond with the citizens living and working in that area.” (Lortz, 2016) A community police officer is assigned to a specific area in their community and their job is to create a relationship between the community and police officers. This allows the community to trust community police officers and to help crime. Community policing has three elements; community partnerships, organizational transformation and problem solving. (Community Oriented Policing Services, n.d.) Community partnerships is to collaborate between law enforcement agency and the individuals and organizations they serve to develop solutions to crimes and to gain trust. Organizational transformation is creating relationships with organizations, personnel and management to create proactive problem solving. Problem solving is to identify the problems and crimes and to evaluate the problems to make a solution.

Community policing is different than traditional policing in many ways. Community policing is meant to prevent crime before it happens where as police officers respond to the crime after the crime was committed. Although police officers try to create a safe social environment, community policing goal is to create a safe environment and to gain the trust of the community. Community policing engages residents to decide what crimes are they most affected by and creates a priority list for law enforcement. Community policing also encourages residents to participate with law enforcement so that they can keep their community safe always. Community policing creates the partnership between the community and law enforcement.

There are many benefits to having community policing. This creates a better view for residents to have on law enforcement. It allows them to gain trust in their local law enforcement agency. It provides accurate information to law enforcement agencies and that helps them solve and come up with a solution to crimes. This also helps the law enforcement agency to understand what their community needs.

A performance appraisal is an evaluation of job performance for subordinates. It determines on whether the subordinates are doing their job correctly. The evaluation also measures their quantity and quality of work, correct specific problems, estimates employee potential, assess attitude, let’s subordinates know how they are doing and to provide supervisors objective data. (Miller, 2017) I believe management by objectives would be best for community policing. Management by objectives is creating goals and objectives into specific programs. Sergeant Tina Thompson is the supervisor for a specific program, Baker 3 which is community policing. This allows for Sergeant Tina Thompson to create goals and set what needs to be done in a given time frame with the resources she has. I believe this would also be great because it maps out future goals and objectives and it allows for the supervisor and employee to get together for this evaluation. This is useful so in the future when Sergeant Tina Thompson needs to evaluate her subordinates again, she can look at the goals that were set and see if the goals were made or not. Management by Objectives steps are to set mutually acceptable goals and objectives, identify resources and actions, prioritizing goals and objectives, setting precise timetables and evaluating results. (Miller, 2017)

Two human errors that may occur are the error of leniency and the halo effect. The error of leniency happens when “human tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt and evaluate their on-the-job performance beyond what the circumstances warrant.” (Miller, 2017) The problem with this is because they supervisor works so closely with the subordinate to create mutually reachable goals together, they can possibly take advantage of that. This can make a supervisor lenient and community police officer to believe they a=can get away with certain things. You can avoid this by being stern and setting a goal with the expected time line. If the officer does not reach this goal with the specific dead line, then discuss that with the officers and let them know that there could be consequences. This should allow the community police officers to take it serious and to reach goals in a timely manner. The halo effect is when a supervisor permits just one outstanding or negative characteristic to shape the overall rating. This can happen because the management by objective only focuses on future goals and does not focus on the past, this can make it to where the supervisor only focuses on one part of the set goal that was made. This can be avoided by evaluating the subordinate not just by the goals they accomplished or the goal they did not accomplish but also by their character, how hard they are working towards their goals, what got in the way of possibly not meeting the goal and does this officer have good ethics and morals. Evaluating the community officer based on everything from start to finish rather than reaching or not reaching the goal will prevent the halo effect.

There are many things that can help the validity and reliability of the results from the management by objective evaluation. The supervisor sets a goal with the employee and gives a timeline. With this information, it allows to see if the employee can reach a set goal given to them. It helps to measure job performance and whether an employee is doing their job or not. It sets goals, timelines, standards and objectives. By collecting this data and evaluating it again later, it allows the Sergeant to see what was set before and what the employee is like now comparing the data.

Community policing is very important for communities to gain trust with their local police departments. Their jobs are a lot different than police officers and need a different evaluation. Setting goals, standards and objectives with employees will help to track and evaluate the employee. There are a couple human errs that can be made but also prevented if the right steps are taken. The validity of information from an evaluation is useful when it comes to evaluated the employee again later. It allows Sergeants to see if their employees are doing their jobs correctly and efficiently.

Sources:

Community Oriented Policing Services – Agency Portal. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://portal.cops.usdoj.gov/

Lortz, M. (2016, December 28). What is Community Policing? Retrieved from https://www.everbridge.com/blog/what-is-community-policing/