2. 1200 WORD Min. at least 3 scholarly sources due 1/16

Case 5: Leading Change in Riverside, California

Riverside, California, is a city of 250,000 residents at the heart of California’s Inland Empire, an agricultural powerhouse that lies to the east of Los Angeles. As Riverside has matured and its agricultural industry has lost the power to carry the local economy entirely, the city has shown some characteristic signs of age and growth, such as a declining downtown and rising crime rates.

In the 1990s, the Riverside Police Department faced some significant challenges, including a lukewarm reputation in the city’s minority communities, a series of lawsuits brought by Riverside citizens, and internal divisions over its leadership and how to handle the agency’s growth, which had made traditionally informal management practices increasingly problematic. Ken Fortier, the chief of police appointed to meet these challenges, was able to revamp the RPD’s administration, helping to install modern systems for everything from budgeting to the serving of search warrants, and he was able to lay the foundations for community policing in the city by spearheading a system of area commands charged with solving community problems. On the other hand, Fortier’s leadership provoked great resistance in Riverside, and many of his reforms were embroiled in turmoil until his departure.

One problem that preceded Chief Fortier was a lack of communication between city government and the RPD. The two groups often didn’t get together on many issues in the first place, and city hall apparently became increasingly uncomfortable with the way police were making decisions on their own. The RPD’s relationship to the community was similar, in the sense that the department had a relatively good public image with most of the community, but little direct dialogue outside of individual calls for service and newspaper reports on specific crimes.

On the other hand, some groups of Riverside residents apparently had serious concerns about their police department: most notably, while only 25 percent of whites rated the RPD’s performance as “only fair” or “poor” in the survey, 54 percent of blacks did so. Also, there was clearly tension between police and at least a significant minority of Latinos. For their part, many police felt threatened by increasingly violent gangs, and they denied the charges of both harassment and under-enforcement. “Like many police departments,” one RPD veteran explained, “our attitude pretty much was like ‘We’re the police, and we go to school for this and train, and we’re the experts in this area.’”

Basic mechanisms for control and direction-setting were underdeveloped in the RPD—at least that was the conclusion of a management audit commissioned by Riverside’s city manager. The audit painted a picture of an organization strong on basic operations but with weak administrative systems. Many of these administrative deficiencies may have been related to the department’s long-established philosophy of management, which many people inside and outside the department referred to as “high trust, low control.” The basic idea was apparently that police should be treated as independent professionals who did not need much direct supervision and structure in their work, whether directly from managers or indirectly from the administrative systems they created and monitored. It was not, of course, that basic organizational checks were not in place: For example, sergeants and lieutenants were expected to make sure that patrol officers followed established procedures, like those that governed pursuits. But, in critical areas—notably discipline and the search warrant process—many RPD veterans report that management took a hands-off approach, preferring to leave matters to officers and detectives themselves with an appeal to their sense of professional integrity.

As Chief Fortier remembers his first days in office, he took over the RPD with a broad mandate for change that focused on implementing community policing and carrying out the main recommendations from the audit. The audit was particularly influential in shaping his sense of the RPD’s strategic issues. “I asked for a copy of the report before I was hired and looked it over,” he remembers, “and it was clear to me that there were some managerial problems that needed to be dealt with. It wasn’t really a blueprint necessarily, but it was pretty clear.” In particular, deficiencies like the lack of an effective internal affairs unit and the lack of an organized training effort were red flags to Fortier that some basic managerial issues needed to be addressed.

Several problems would soon emerge. First of all, the infrastructure effort turned out to be deeply problematic for many officers in Riverside, which had an established history of doing things informally and did not necessarily see a need to change. For example, one of Fortier’s first initiatives as chief was an attempt to deal with the informality of the RPD’s labor agreements, but when the department released booklet copies of the new agreement to all employees, it had an effect opposite to what Fortier intended. “We thought this would be popular,” he remembers. This experience, in particular, convinced Fortier that there was a severe division between management and the rank-and-file: “There’d just been years and years of miscommunication and distrust and ineffective management—there’s no other way to put it. It was really us and them.”

The second problem was the somewhat ad hoc nature of the infrastructure effort, emerging as it did by pieces, with the result that some RPD members could not perceive any clear vision guiding the changes that were taking place. Jerry Carroll, who became chief after Fortier, suggests that Fortier’s role as a change agent made it positively inadvisable for him to articulate what he was doing. “I asked the deputy chief one time, ‘I want to see the vision,’” Carroll remembers. “He said, ‘He’s not going to show you the vision’—because the vision was an agenda and the agenda was to come in and change the culture here in this police department.” In any case, the result was that there was little buy-in to the reforms Fortier had in mind. “I don’t think anybody knew what the vision was,” Carroll maintains. “It was not articulated.”

Fortier sought to put together a management team that was committed not just to community policing in particular, but to organizational reform in general. To that end, he sought to quickly promote people to management positions who were capable and committed to reform, and to speed up the retirement of those who were not. Fortier also looked outside the department altogether for people who had some of the qualifications that its own officers lacked. The backlash against this effort was severe—at best department members resented the loss of a rare promotion opportunity, and at worst they took the move as a statement that in Fortier’s eyes, “in-house people weren’t good enough.”

This effort and a parallel one to revise the criteria for promotion to all supervisory and management positions also alienated many RPD members and thereby backfired with respect to the goal of building support for reform. Most simply, while Fortier could fill management positions using new criteria, he could not ensure that the new managers would have the necessary influence over their rank-and-file officers. Indeed, as the criteria for promotion changed, the entire process apparently lost some legitimacy in the eyes of the troops, so that many officers became cynical about how their new superiors had made their ranks.

The basic problem was that promotions themselves did not necessarily breed loyalty in a situation where reform stirred up many other sources of resistance. It was not simply that the face of management was changing: its mandate was changing as well, and in ways that exacerbated growing tensions within the RPD.

These issues, together with several cost-cutting measures (including cutting court-related overtime and reducing the size of the patrol fleet) radicalized the Riverside Police Officers Association (RPOA) and led to an all-out assault on Fortier’s leadership, punctuated by an overwhelming vote of no confidence. Officer complaints grew one-by-one, from the patrol car issue, to the complaint policy, to promotion decisions, to changes to working schedules. Even reforms that did not get implemented, like a proposal to give the chief the power to move detectives back into patrol assignments, added to anti-Fortier sentiment. Finally, some complaints centered not on specific policies but on Fortier’s blunt style of management, his reputation for inflexibility, and on allegations that he played favorites and told inconsistent stories to different audiences.

Fortier’s backers dismissed accusations that he was indifferent to officer opinion, maintaining that the chief had made extraordinary efforts to express his support for the troops and include them in decision making. Fortier was, they argued, the first chief in Riverside’s memory to include an RPOA representative in command staff meetings; he made frequent appearances at roll calls and in ride-alongs; and he repeatedly made statements to the press about the quality of Riverside’s police. The chief also paid attention to small details: for example, when a crack showed up in an officer’s 9 mm gun, Fortier ordered new guns for the entire department and asked officers what type they wanted. Finally, new policy decisions were almost always justified in dispatches sent to the entire patrol force, so that officers would understand why changes were being made.

But these strategies for building support never paid off inside the department. Some argue that by the time Fortier entered his second year in Riverside, it was already too late, for the conflict between management and the officers had become personal. At that time, a veteran narcotics detective named Jack Palm took over the RPOA presidency and began waging an intense battle to remove Fortier from office. None of this turmoil, Fortier insists, had any direct bearing on his decision to retire after five years as chief, a decision that he says was motivated by growing medical problems. But the former chief admits that the constant stress of the job—as well as the serious personal harassment he and his wife began facing—contributed to those medical problems.

Source: Adapted from David Thacher. n.d. “National COPS Evaluation: Organizational Change Case Study—Riverside, California.” Online at: www.ncjrs.gov/nij/cops_casestudy/riversid.html.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.This case study describes a four-year effort by a new chief, brought in from the outside, to implement change in the Riverside Police Department. How successful was the effort? Why wasn’t it more successful? What would you have done differently, if anything?

2.Clearly, the Riverside Police Department had some labor/management issues. Why do labor and management sometimes get into conflict in police departments? What could Chief Fortier have done to try to reduce the labor/management conflict in Riverside?

3.Analyze the case from the standpoint of leadership and management styles. Which styles of leadership and management did Chief Fortier represent, compared to the styles that had preceded him in Riverside. Was his approach the most effective one? Why or why not?

4.Analyze the case in terms of the approaches to organization development discussed in Chapter 9 and the contemporary management models presented in Chapter 15. Which of these approaches did Chief Fortier rely on the most? If you were appointed police chief in Riverside following Chief Fortier’s retirement, which methods and models would you implement to complete the process of organizational change in the department?