Institutional Assessment and Change

University of San Diego

Josh Abbott

March 7, 2022

https://joabbo.weebly.com/
 Looking inward at both oneself and one's organization separates a leader from a simple

supervisor. To do this, a leader must critically self-reflect and be capable of honest assessment.

Furthermore, for leaders to make improvements, they must be willing to make the changes

necessary to improve themselves or their organization.

This section provides an opportunity to show examples of writings that focus on both

assessment and instituting change. These writings contain actual samples of challenges facing

the law enforcement profession and deal with ideas and strategies that may effectively overcome

these challenges. Another writing is an honest assessment of a citizen survey and its meaningful

relevance to the importance of data analytics for the Central Point Police Department.

This section's first writing example, Disclosure of Peace Officer Records Laws, was a

paper that tasked us to discuss the real challenge of public request laws making it increasingly

difficult for agencies to protect the privacy of their employees. Depending on one's view, this is a

situation where leaders are pitted against their desire to protect their employees and the forced

legal requirements that are ever more intrusive. While this is not a change made voluntarily, it is

a change nonetheless. Therefore, I begin the paper by discussing the issues and the need for

leaders to accept some change can not be avoided. However, despite the potentially bad news, I

give my thoughts on ideas that could help deter the loss of trust from employees and the amount

of negative-minded requests by building public trust through media relation teams.

My second writing was an evaluation of the City of Central Point's primary citizen

concerns and problems using local survey results and FBI crime data and using those results to

show the value of crime data analytics. This assignment allowed me to analyze the problems
facing my city and agency and assess how the police department was responding to those

concerns and issues.

Finally, the third paper was an assignment that required we use a political metaphor from

the textbook, Images of Organizations to speak on a current challenge facing law enforcement. I

discussed police hiring and retention of employees. This particular issue is a frustrating problem

faced by uncountable agencies, big and small, throughout the United States currently. For many

reasons, many covered within the writing, traditional methods are no longer working to attract

quality candidates. Departments must be able and willing to self-reflect and make changes

necessary to attract new generations. Topics like changing work-life balance, flexible schedules,

mentorship, new training focus, and other non-traditional ideas will be required to attract and

retain younger generations. Police agencies are no longer competing with one another but

competing with other industries.

Change can be brutal and honest self-assessment maybe even harder. Yet, through many

of the classes and assignments in the University of San Diego's Law Enforcement and Public

Safety program, I could flex my creative and critical mind to better prepare myself for these

truths and challenges. Being aware that self-reflection is necessary is the first step to accepting

change, whether voluntary or forced upon us.