Determinants of Police Department Change: An Institutional Theory Approach
Overview
Following the 2014 death of Michael Brown and the ensuing Ferguson unrest, the 53 municipal police departments operating within St. Louis County faced intense societal pressure to modernize accountability, training, and use-of-force policies. This empirical doctoral research investigates the organizational, coercive, normative, and mimetic determinants that drove policy adoption across the fractured metropolitan landscape.
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Research Questions & Theoretical Framework
- Focusing Events: How do acute external crises overcome institutional inertia in decentralized public safety systems?
- Isomorphic Pressures: Applying DiMaggio and Powell’s neo-institutional theory to evaluate whether reform is driven by Coercive (political/legal mandate), Normative (professional credentials/associations), or Mimetic (peer emulation under uncertainty) forces.
- Structural Fragmentation: How municipal tax bases, sworn staffing levels, and CALEA accreditation condition an agency’s capacity to operationalize progressive policing standards.
Methodology & Findings
- Census Survey: Administered a standardized instrument to all 53 municipal police departments in St. Louis County ($n = 25$, $47.2%$ response rate).
- Longitudinal Policy Diffusion: Documented that 58% of all progressive policy adoptions across the 19 tracked areas occurred during the 5-year post-Ferguson window (2014–2019).
- Multiple OLS Regression: The regression model ($R^2 = 0.671, \text{Adj } R^2 = 0.548, F = 5.438, p = 0.0031$) demonstrated that Mimetic Isomorphism ($\beta = 1.477, p = 0.045$) and organizational staffing capacity ($\beta = 0.174, p = 0.008$) were the primary statistically significant predictors of reform. Coercive pressure and normative credentials failed to reach significance.
- Qualitative Grounding: Semi-structured interviews with five police chiefs analyzed via NVivo software confirmed that departments actively benchmarked against accredited peers to secure organizational legitimacy while collective bargaining units exhibited minimal obstruction.