In American Policing in 2022: Essays on the future of a Profession, the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services invited police practitioners to share their vision of policing 10 years in the future.1 Their responses revealed a vision where collaboration, analysis, and leadership are the calling cards of a successful police department and where that success is measured by the absence of fear and an increase in community safety, rather than by arrests and Part I crime statistics. For many in the field, this is the vision of a glorious future.
It is, however, a future that will require significant organizational change, which is neither an easy nor instantaneous thing to do. In fact, the speed of organizational change can be downright glacial. Perhaps the reference to ice is appropriate since Kurt Lewin’s “three stages of change—unfreeze, change, and refreeze—continue to be a generic recipe for organizational development,” and central to many organizational change theories more than 60 years after they were first published.
