Introduction
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is a security department focused on maintaining law and order in the entire Los Angeles. Therefore, they have many challenges to streamline within this department. The key objective is to enforce the law and ensure that this is done with a sense of fairness and justice, whereby the police are required to act within the bill of rights for the country. It is for this reason that the management needs to be well established and enthusiastic in the implementation of the law of the land without having to use excessive force, as this would be against the constitution. Therefore, the paper will discuss the primary management responsibilities, processes of management, and the key challenges affecting the LAPD.
To achieve this, there is a need to consider all the challenges to overcome, in order to strategize appropriately and be able to come up with effective ways to curb the challenges. Precautionary measures should be taken rather than concentrating on solving crime incidences. Consequently, the LAPD has a hierarchy of managers, supervisors, senior officers and the police who implement the actions brought forward.
Primary management functions of the LAPD
The LAPD management has various roles to ensure the effective and efficient implementation of the law. To begin with, they have a role to manage their resources and facilities. This implies that the assignment of resources should be in such a way that, they are well distributed across all departments of the LAPD and in such a manner that they contribute to the main goal of the entire department. The vital resources include vehicles, communication facilities and security facilities such as guns. Another key resource is the number of police officers in the field, since they are the ground men, and are the ones directly interacting with crime scenes as well as the criminals.
The second management policy that should be implemented is planning, which involves the establishment of various problems, the objectives, strategies, and designing the implementation process. The management intervenes to investigate and establish the chief causes of crimes, the vulnerable victims and the perpetrators of the same. In this way, they are able to sit and carefully strategize on the ways in which the crimes can be eliminated or at least reduced. This should be accompanied by laying down their ultimate goals or the objectives in order to work along with them, and management remains with the responsibility of seeing them implemented. For example, they would establish which crime is a priority at the time. More resources would be allocated to such a project and more police officers commissioned to attend to the matter (McNamara, 1999).
Management Process
The management process in the LAPD involves the use of all the available skills, resources, workforce and policies to meet set goals in the maintenance of Law and order. Given that their priority is maintaining peace and harmony in society, the management must ensure that all decisions and actions taken are dedicated towards this goal (Koch, 1996). Therefore, they have to make wise decisions at any stage of the peace implementation to ensure the satisfaction of society. Therefore, this process entails determining the root problems, the best way to approach them, and eventually the resources required to implement the strategies of curbing the problem. This situation demands that the decisions are accurate, and their implementations are timely (McNamara, 1999).
Major challenges in the LAPD
Implementation of the law by LAPD is faced with various obstacles. To begin with, it is always a challenge to exercise the virtues of fairness and defend human rights while at the same time trying to obtain information from a criminal (Choe, 2012). This occurs when only one criminal is arrested in a crime involving a number of criminals. Such a criminal may be adamant to give any names unless they are coerced. There is always a conflict between if to worry about the person’s rights or to obtain forcefully the required information, which would help the whole society.
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Another major challenge in the police department is corruption. In some cases, the perpetrators of crimes are usually influential people in the state who are wealthy and may sometimes be part of the LAPD department. These people are able to offer a lot of money to the police in order to have their cases lifted. For instance, drug dealers use this department to cover their actions. They pay money in order to be protected from such criminal accusations (LAPD, 2012).
In conclusion, the paper has explored the functions of management, process and challenges during operations of the LAPD, which are majorly influenced by the top-level management of the LAPD department. Their organization and strategy implementation determine the course of action of the police officers. In fact, Koch (1996) explains that the police ought to possess the virtues of cooperation, honesty and integrity in implementing their responsibilities; hence, the public must be cooperative and should have a mutual relationship with the police.
References
Choe, J. (2012). Police departments face challenges. Web.
Koch, U. (1996). Intercultural human resource management for police cooperation in Europe. Web.
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LAPD. (2012). Management Principles of the LAPD. Web.
McNamara, C. (1999). Definitions and Misconceptions about Management. Web.