Police
Officer Performance Evaluations: What’s the Point?
It might take a little more than a nickel every time I
heard that question, but if it were a dollar I’d at least have enough for
dinner and a movie. It’s a good question
though and sometimes I wonder why police supervisors have such difficulty
answering it. It could be that
upper-management does not do a good job explaining “why” to first line
supervisors. It also might be that
evaluations are not used many times by departments the way they should be meant
to be used. I suspect both are true, so
let me try to explain why I think they are valuable to law enforcement organizations.
I don’t know that I ever met a supervisor who enjoyed
writing an evaluation and they sure don’t like presenting them to their
officers. I still don’t relish the idea
of having to do them, particularly when one or two of them might not be the
glowing tribute of performance that someone had expected. It’s simply not easy to tell another person
that their work product is subpar. Let’s
face it, even cops really don’t like confrontation, but most will have to admit
that we would rather deal with it out on the street than in the office with a
subordinate. In the long run though,
performance evaluations can actually make a supervisor’s life easier if given
and used correctly. Even if a line
sergeant never had any supervisory training or if so, it was extremely lacking
(which unfortunately is the case most times) it usually doesn’t take long to
figure out that it is not good tact to approach problems with performance by
telling an officer “hey man, your work product sucks.” Instead, a well-designed and well-written
evaluation can help both supervisor and subordinate get through the process, if
used more as a teaching and learning tool.
Yea I know, administrators like to insert the words “teaching” or
“learning” somewhere into the process for experiences that are normally
considered anything but educational by the line officer on the other side of
the desk. Perhaps phrasing it that way
might seem to make the task a little less unpleasant for both sides. However, from my experiences it seems that if
the evaluation process is treated as such, there can be a measurable
improvement for some officers in job performance. So along with the normal praise and criticism
it would help to also formulate a few measurable performance goals (even better
if your subordinates have some input into them) for the new evaluation period. This does two things: Instead of the normally subjective criteria
officers are expected to perform well on, they can be given better defined
goals that can actually be measured, which in effect should make the evaluation
fairer. Secondly, the onus is placed on officers
to live up to performance standards. When they have articulable goals given to them
and then then don’t meet the standard, they can’t really fault their supervisor
for their failure. Two suggestions though:
don’t give goals that absolutely mean nothing or are so easy to reach that they
are ridiculous. Doing so helps foster
the feeling prevalent among many officers that evaluations are a joke. Conversely, although goals need to be somewhat
challenging to provide a better measurement of the officer’s performance, they
shouldn’t be exceedingly difficult to accomplish. Line officers most times are primarily
responsible for responding to calls for service, so any goals given should not burden
that key responsibility.
One common complaint of
evaluations is that they are subjective in nature and therefore officer
performance is dictated by one supervisor’s perception of a particular officer,
whereas another supervisor might assess the same officer’s performance in a
different way. Having taken part in
evaluation processes for a number of years including participation on and
chairing of committees formed to design performance standards and evaluations I
can confidently say that’s probably true.
Honestly, I don’t think there is a way to eliminate that phenomenon
completely from the process, much like policy and procedures can’t possible
address every scenario that an officer might be confronted with out on the
street. But if the standards are thought
out, spelled out, and a department does a good job explaining how evaluations
should be applied, much of that subjectiveness can be managed. The experience I have had is that if an
agency does not promote performance evaluations to their people in a positive
manner then they become a useless tool.
By promoting I mean first of all that officers from bottom to top should
have input into the design of any evaluation, including what the standards that
are going to be used really mean. Not everyone
will be happy with the final format, but at least some consensus should come
out of it. Secondly, management needs to
stress what the evaluations will be used for.
Are they going to be used for counseling, discipline, job assignments,
or something else? Finally, use them for
those purposes. It’s always interesting
to hear an officer say, “They’re not going to fire me over it,” referring to
poor performance reflected in their evaluation.
Perhaps that is true in many cases, especially if civil service or work
contracts make it more difficult to discipline for poor performance, but that’s
not true with all agencies. At the
minimum in many departments performance evaluations are used to eliminate
officers from consideration for more prestigious assignments or to move
officers in those assignments back to shift work, so it’s folly for officers to
think that poor performance has to be accepted by their agency.
So, having done all of the above
should we expect total buy in from all our officers. Most likely not. We need to face the fact that there is a
historical mistrust from line officers toward how their job performance is
measured. However, if we put some
thought into what is important to evaluate and what we want to accomplish with the
evaluation process, and we use the evaluations for the
legitimate purposes that we promised, some of the suggestions in this article
might help demonstrate to our officers that there is a point to performance
evaluations.