Why Must Read Effective Police Supervision?

Shockingly bad. I was highly disappointed that our administrators felt that this was a worthy book to require for promotional testing. This book is merely a collection of other people's work punctuated by the writer's opinions (with no explanation or reasoning as to how they came to decide their opinions). I was shocked at the attitude toward patrol-level officers as portrayed in this book. As a 26 year veteran I can tell you that the authors are either talking about patrol officers from the 1970's or actors from television police dramas. I have worked for two different agencies and on several multi-agency units (including federal) and the author's depictions of front-line police officers is appalling. They draw conclusions about officer behaviors from reviews of other people's studies and statistics. I feel like one of the authors must be a disgruntled former police administrator with a serious chip on his shoulder about first-line employees. I realize that this is an eighth edition, but the police communication studies from the 80's are just no longer relevant. Also, the author's religiously give credit to other parties scholarly studies but then throw in their own opinions and "statistics" (..."up to 15 percent" of officers require discipline) with no basis or proof. Someone should also tell them that putting two stacks of words next to each other and putting a box around them does not make a "chart" and certainly doesn't allow the reader to figure out what relationship between the subjects they are trying to depict. Let me say that there is some really excellent information in this book, but ALL of the useful information is from other scholars. I suppose we should be grateful to the authors for putting such a fine collection of other peoples work together but it is interposed with such inexplicable conclusions (and a laughable fetish for acronyms and "buzzwords") that reading it is almost an exercise in futility. You can find good info in this book if you search, but the author's do you no favors in trying to find it. EDIT: Upon completing the book I realized that much of my frustration of it comes from the fact that it is entirely outdated material. Much of the description of the "typical" police officer and "typical" police department is from 30+ years ago. Also, the portions of the book discussing Community Policing are from the early 90's when the idea was just picking up steam. In this day and age that information is remedial at best, but mostly historical. Officers currently testing as first-line supervisors have worked under the community-policing framework since the day they were hired.