Necessary Conversation: Grand Challenges in Police Organization Research

Please join IHMA and SIM for a Necessary Conversation and Panel Discussion about Emerging Grand Challenges in Police Organization Research.

Please join the International Humanistic Management Association (IHMA) and the Academy of Management (AOM) Social Issues in Management (SIM) Division for a Necessary Conversation with Distinguished Panelists to discuss Emerging Grand Challenges in Police Organization Research. The goal of this IHMA-SIM event is to bring together prominent scholars from criminal justice and management to advance interdisciplinary research and initiate dynamic collaborations.

Date: Friday, January 15

Time: 12:00 pm – 1:30pm (ET)

Location: Web conferencing, details will be sent before the event once your RSVP is received.

This Necessary Conversation is sponsored by the Donahue Center for Business Ethics & Social Responsibility in the Manning School of Business at University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Topic for this Conversation:  Crim Meets SIM: Emerging Grand Challenges in Police Organization Research

Social movements centering on the role of the police, police interactions within minority communities, and issues of racial justice and systematic racism have prompted calls for substantive changes to the practice of policing. This panel brings together a number of criminal justice scholars to discuss opportunity gaps in interdisciplinary research on policing and police organizations. Panelists will discuss the key challenges that face researchers and practitioners who seek to impact the future of policing.

Further Details:

The coercive and sometimes brutal nature of police interventions within communities of color have been an ever-present feature of American society. Many high profile incidents – such as the Zoot Suit riots targeting Mexican Americans in the 1940s, the Rodney King beating in L.A, and the killings of Atatiana Jefferson and Mah-hi-vist Goodblanket – serve as historical markers of brutality on the timeline of American policing. However, many more incidents have received little to no attention. Issues of systemic racism, excessive uses of force, and the brutalization and unwarranted killings of citizens are well-known within Black, Native, and Hispanic American communities. Despite the long history of these abuses and attempts to hold individual officers and police organizations responsible for misconduct, prior to 2020 there seemed to be a lack of political and social will to institute wide-ranging change. The Black Lives Matter movement has forced a kind of reckoning within the world of policing.

Global social movements calling for police reform within America and abroad have created a unique opportunity to build collaborative partnerships between policing/criminal justice and management/organizational behavior scholars. We are presented with an opportunity to come together to address the most pressing organizational, leadership, and management issues facing police organizations today, as well as those that are likely to define the practice of policing well into the future. As society demands changes to the practice of policing, particularly within minority communities, innovative inter-disciplinary collaborations can transform policing research, as well as academic-practitioner partnerships and engagement.

This 90-minute discussion will bring together prominent scholars from criminal justice and management with the goal of initiating dynamic scholarly collaborations. Topics discussed in the session will include:

– The impact of calls for social change and police reform on the management of police organizations

– How the current climate is affecting officer recruitment, retention, engagement and morale

– Spillover effects as workplace, social, and personal issues interact to create unique occupationally derived stressors for police officers and leadership

– Challenges and barriers to effecting substantive and lasting organizational change efforts

– Potential impacts to criminal justice education, law enforcement training and certification, continuing education, and academic-law enforcement partnerships

– Managing stakeholder demands for reform, changes to the management and monitoring of officer behavior, and rebuilding trust with communities

About the Moderator:

Dr. Jay P. Kennedy is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed to the School of Criminal Justice and the Center for Anti-Counterfeiting and Product Protection. He is also a Faculty Affiliate with the Michigan State University Graduate School, and Affiliated Faculty with the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and the Center for Business and Social Analytics. Dr. Kennedy is actively involved in research, education, and outreach efforts that focus on external partners including corporations, industry associations, and law enforcement agencies. His current research explores managerial and organizational responses to employee theft within small and medium enterprises, the incarceration and post-incarceration experiences of white-collar offenders, the sale of counterfeit goods on the Internet, and the structure of occupational pharmaceutical counterfeiting schemes. Dr. Kennedy’s work has been published in a number of outlets, including American Behavioral Scientist, Criminal Justice Review, Journal of Crime and Justice, Journal of Financial Crime, Security Journal, and Victims and Offenders. He is currently serving as an elected board member of the American Society of Criminology’s Division of White-Collar and Corporate Crime and is an editorial board member for the Journal of White-Collar and Corporate Crime and the International Journal of Cybercrime Intelligence and Cybersecurity. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan State University, Dr. Kennedy completed his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice and an MBA at the University of Cincinnati.

About the Panelists:

Dr. Lorenzo M. Boyd is a nationally recognized leader in police-community relations and an authority on urban policing. He is the Vice President for Diversity & Inclusion and former director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven. He served for 14 years in the Sheriff’s department in Boston, and has been a sought after police trainer for the past 20 years. A former president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Science and a life member of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), Dr. Boyd has appeared on local, regional, national, and international media outlets to discuss policing in the aftermath of many high-profile cases. Widely published, he recently authored the book, Massachusetts’s Criminal Justice System. His book chapters include “Black Lives Matter: The Watchdog for the Criminal Justice System” in Appearance Bias and Crime, and “Does Police Discretion Help or Harm Our Criminal Justice System?” in Crime and Criminal Justice: Concepts and Controversies. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Northeastern University, his M.A. in applied sociology and a B.A. in Sociology & Political Science from the University of Massachusetts.

Dr. Robert A. Brown is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice at North Carolina Central University. He earned his B.A. in Political Science from Hampton University, his M.S. in Criminology from Indiana State University, and his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati. Prior to earning his doctorate, he worked as a sentencing mitigation specialist for the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA) coordinating offender-specific rehabilitation and supervision plans for offenders at the state and federal levels. Dr. Brown’s research focuses on street-level interactions between police officers and citizens (e.g., citation, arrest, use of force), the influence of race and gender (of officials and offenders) on criminal justice processing, and the impact of intermediate sanctions and problem-solving courts on rehabilitation and criminal justice processing. His scholarly work has been published in Justice Quarterly; The Journal of Criminal Justice; Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management; The Journal of Crime and Justice; The Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice; Criminal Justice Studies; and “The Blackwell Companion to Criminology.”

Dr. Jacinta M. Gau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on police-community relations, procedural justice and police legitimacy, and racial issues in policing. Dr. Gau has also examined police policies, strategies, and training. She has trained police officers on community policing and procedural justice and is currently a member of the Fair and Impartial Education and Training task force examining possible changes to police academy curriculum.

Eugene A. Paoline III is a Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in criminal justice from the University at Albany, State University of New York. His areas of expertise include police culture, police use of force, and occupational attitudes of criminal justice practitioners. He is the author of Rethinking Police Culture (2001, LFB Scholarly Publishing) and Police Culture: Adapting to the Strains of the Job (2014, Carolina Academic Press). He has also published numerous research articles that have appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals. In addition, he was a Co-Principal Investigator on a large-scale National Institute of Justice grant that examined the variation in American less lethal use of force policies and their impact on a variety of outcomes. He recently completed (as Co-Principal Investigator) a National Institute of Justice grant that will examine the structure, operation, and effectiveness of Early Intervention (EI) systems that track problematic police behaviors.

Dr. Jeffrey P. Rush has more than 30 years of teaching experience and has served more than 40 years in the criminal justice profession. His areas of expertise include gangs, human trafficking, law enforcement, terrorism, homeland and private security, leadership and juvenile justice. A published author in all these areas, Dr. Rush is a graduate of SWOTT and has been a certified Instructor/Trainer for Community Response to Active Shooter Events (CRASE), ALICE, State and Local Terrorism Training (SLATT), and Valor for Blue. He is also a certified gang specialist by the National Gang Crime Research Center. A past president and secretariat of the Southern Criminal Justice Association, Dr. Rush served on the editorial board of The Gang Journal and was the former co-editor of The Police Forum. He is a Past President of the Alabama Gang Investigator’s Association and currently serves as the Chairman of the Police Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and as a board member of the Security and Crime Prevention section. Dr. Rush earned a doctorate in Public Administration from the University of Alabama, as well as a Master of Science in Criminal Justice, Master of Arts in Educational Leadership and Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice, all from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

This event is a collaboration between IHMA, SIM, and criminal justice scholars. The purpose of this initiative is to identify areas for collaborative and interdisciplinary research that address issues of racial justice with regards to the practice of management within police organizations.

The Necessary Conversations Global Research Forum is an initiative of the United Nations PRME Working Group on Humanistic Management.

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