Holding your officers accountable. This may not be as easy as it seems. As a Chief or command officer you hope that your leadership style is one that breeds trust and respect within the department. This means not only making sure that officer morale is strong by rewarding a job well done and caring about your officers as individuals, but also holding them accountable. Holding your officers accountable shows that departmental expectations and values matter and it sets a baseline for performance expectations.

What exactly do we mean by "accountable"?

There's a difference between compliance and commitment. We all know of, or have had an experience with an employee or coworker who shows up each day and goes through the motions. That's being compliant. Effective officers are not just committed to doing their job, but to going above and beyond the call of duty to ensure they are doing everything they can to keeping their community safe. As a command officer it's not always obvious who is compliant and who is committed. So, how can you start to identify those that are just compliant vs. those that are committed? First of all, It's important to know what each officer does while out on patrol and to have a way to manage their performance. If there is no way to measure officer performance then it's harder to see what improvements need to be made in order to achieve the kind of results you're looking for. Accountability isn't about discipline and punishment, it's about seizing the opportunity for improvement. When your employees are managed effectively then you are able to ensure that everyone understands what departmental expectations are and where improvements need to be made.

There are many different ways one can measure officer performance. In this new era of data-driven decisions, it is preferable to have a set of objective and quantitative tools to achieve this. The PredPol platform can help. It lets you define missions, assign targeted patrol areas to your officers, monitor their performance on patrol using AVL or GPS, and ultimately measure their crime-prevention impact. 

Using a tool like PredPol makes it simple and easy for command staff to see who top performers are and what areas of patrol need the most attention. PredPol helps you hold your officers accountable by managing them to your department's missions. We give command staff insight into exactly how effective their officers are at deterring crime in the areas they patrol. This allows them to give officers feedback right away to ensure that performance improvements can be made in a timely manner. Feedback is important in making sure that everyone is on the same page and all employees are held to the same standard. Our GPS and patrol heat map features shows command staff exactly where their officers patrol and how much time they've spent in a specific area during their shift. And now, with our new Custom Boxes feature, we've added another level of control and transparency. Command officers can augment PredPol's patrol recommendations with their own custom patrol areas for special events or assignments. This degree of transparency into patrol operations has given agencies a more objective way to manage their officers and them accountable for their performance. This in turn, creates a more committed culture within the department and allows agencies to be more effective at keeping their communities safe.

To learn more about the features mentioned above