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Since 1987, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has periodically collected data from police agencies in the USA and disseminated these data as the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) series. The purpose of this paper is to outline LEMAS's impact on criminal justice scholarship by describing the nexus between policing scholarship and LEMAS, and by analyzing the LEMAS constructs and variables used by researchers in refereed journal articles.

A systematic review of the literature is undertaken to better comprehend how scholars use LEMAS variables and constructs. In total, 114 peer-reviewed journal articles were analyzed to parcel out variables and constructs derived from LEMAS data.

The paper's analysis reveals that LEMAS is the second-most used BJS data series and the majority of authors use LEMAS to measure elements of organizational structure but not organizational behaviors, outcomes, or outputs.

The study is the first to systematically identify all peer-reviewed journal articles that utilize LEMAS data. Police organizational research is unique in the fact that most authors agree on the operationalization of variables and constructs.

To provide water utilities operating under rationing conditions with some insight into issues related to managing non‐revenue water (NRW).

Reviews general theories associated with pressure, surges and water leakage, and compares them with real data in a rationed water distribution system.

In water networks there is a strong relationship between rationing hours and rationing surge pressures and NRW levels. These relationships mean that traditional ways of benchmarking NRW are not useful in rationed systems.

This paper identifies key NRW issues for utilities operating under rationing and gives them help in identifying options for their NRW strategies.

The current research explores the structural elaboration of municipal American police organizations, specifically, the structural complexity of police organizations and its relationship to time. The purpose of this paper is to describe and test essential elements of the structural elaboration hypothesis.

The authors explore the structural elaboration hypothesis utilizing a sample of 219 large police departments across the USA. Data are drawn from multiple waves of the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey and are analyzed using tobit and OLS regression techniques.

While there is some evidence that police departments are becoming more elaborate, little evidence for the structural elaboration hypothesis as a function of time is found.

This project is the first to specifically explore the structural elaboration hypothesis across multiple time points. Additionally, results highlight structural trends across a panel of large American police organizations and provide potential explanations for changes. Suggestions for large-scale policing data collection are also provided.

Most police agencies in the USA make the claim that they use social media, and such use is drawing a great academic attention. Most studies on police use of social media focus on the content of police social media websites. Little research, however, has been conducted regarding what types of police agencies are in fact making use of social media. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap in the knowledge.

The study reported here analyzes the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) data set to identify the principal organizational characteristics of police agencies associated with the use of social media. Binary logistic regression is used to identify significant independent predictors of police use of social media, viewed here as a form of innovation.

The findings indicate that the workforce size (commissioned and civilian personnel) of a police agency, the level of participation in multi-jurisdictional task forces and the early use of an official agency website to communicate with the public are the predictors of police use of social media.

Three theories pertaining to organizational behavior (i.e. contingency theory, institutional theory, and resource dependency theory), as well as Maguire’s (2003) study, are used to establish the theoretical framework for the research reported here.

Viewed as a pioneering study testing organizational theories related to police use of social media, the current study sets forth findings that help deepen the collective understanding of contingency theory, institutional theory and resource dependency theory as frameworks for explaining organizational behavior in policing.

Gender representation in policing is an important but understudied topic. This study aimed to evaluate the relationship between female representation in police departments and the acquisition of body-worn cameras (BWCs). Further, it examined how female representation influenced the reasons for acquiring BWCs.

Data were gathered from the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey and the 2016 Body-Worn Camera Supplement to the LEMAS.

Controlling for relevant organizational characteristics, findings highlight the importance of female representation in terms of the acquisition of BWCs. In addition, findings point to the effect that increased female representation has on the reasons for acquiring BWCs. Namely, agencies with a greater percentage of female patrol officers were more likely to acquire body cameras for reasons related to improving community relations, professionalism, training, reducing use of force and strengthening leadership.

This paper provides evidence of the positive influence of female representation in policing.

This paper fulfills the identified need to examine the influence of gender representation in police organizations. In addition, it advances the direction of recent research to merge large data sets in order to provide a unique look at the research questions.

Policymakers have long suggested diversifying US police forces, which typically have white male majorities among officers. This article explores to what extent police diversity has changed over time in large agencies, as well as whether different diversity benchmarks may matter for agencies.

The authors draw data from the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey for 358 agencies that had at least 100 full-time sworn officers in 1997 and 2016 and that reported officer demographic data to the LEMAS in both years. For a selection of 12 communities – three randomly chosen in each of the four US Census regions – the authors compare officer diversity to Census data on population diversity for different benchmarks.

There has been some increase in diversity but policing largely remains a white male profession. The authors find only limited variation in diversity by type of benchmark – e.g. total population, working population or recruiting-age population – a community considers. This suggests communities may wish to choose a benchmark they can best measure and seek to increase diversity by it, and research on workforce representation may not be sensitive to benchmark choice. The authors also suggest communities and their police organizations consider other ways to assess diversity, including those that illustrate a broader range of attributes and representation throughout the organization, and that they research and test alternative forms of measurement to gauge whether these findings hold for different modeling approaches.

Our analysis is limited to the largest police agencies and to overall staffing level diversity metrics pertaining to sex, race and Hispanic origin. Still, we find many police agencies have room for greater diversity, which could draw more qualified workers and lead to better policing.

While there has been much attention to police diversity in recent decades, there have been few efforts to compare alternative measurement approaches. This research provides guidance to some initial measures, as well as further considerations communities may wish to make.

Organizational research has suggested that network ties influence adoption of innovations and other organizational behavior. This paper aims to study the impact of network ties on change in police agency practices in a sample of city and county police agencies for which Weiss provided data on informal communication ties between agency planners.

The authors analyzed change in six agency practices from 1997 to 2000, as indicated in law enforcement management and administrative statistics (LEMAS) data, with a variable indicating whether an agency's network contact engaged in the practice.

Network ties appeared to influence change in computer use for crime mapping, with change more likely when the agency and its network contact initially differed with respect to the practice. Statistically significant network influences were not found for change in the other practices (existence of a formal community policing plan, geographic assignment of detectives, encouragement of scanning, analysis, response, and assessment (SARA) problem‐solving, computer use for resource allocation, and patrol access to criminal histories).

Results suggest that network ties may affect change in policing practices and innovation, but that this does not necessarily hold across all types of practices.

With at least some evidence of network influences, results suggest that policymakers should attempt to take advantage of network structure when encouraging beneficial changes in agency practices.

This paper studies the impact of network ties on change in police agency practices in a sample of city and county police agencies.

To measure the practice and management of proactive policing in local American police agencies and assess them in comparison to recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Proactive Policing.

A survey was conducted with a national sample of American police agencies having 100 or more sworn officers to obtain detailed information about the types of proactive work that officers engage in, to quantify their proactive work and to understand how the agencies measure and manage those activities. Responding agencies (n = 180) were geographically diverse and served populations of approximately half a million persons on average.

Proactivity as practiced is much more limited in scope than what the NAS envisions. Most agencies track only a few forms of proactivity and cannot readily estimate how much uncommitted time officers have available for proactive work. Measured proactivity is mostly limited to traffic stops, business and property checks and some form of directed or general preventive patrol. Many agencies have no formal policy in place to define or guide proactive activities, nor do they evaluate officer performance on proactivity with a detailed and deliberate rubric.

This is the first national survey that attempts to quantify proactive policing as practiced broadly in the United States. It provides context to the NAS recommendations and provides knowledge about the gap between practice and those recommendations.

Descriptive analyses of campus police agencies reveal that agencies’ tactical and operational features are similar to those found in municipal agencies. The problem is that none of these studies have examined, using multivariate models, the structural characteristics of these organizations. Using LEMAS data collected in 1995, this study answered two main questions: what are the organizational characteristics of campus police agencies; and what factors, both internal and external, explain variation in the structural dimensions of the agencies. The results indicated that campus police agencies possess the same structural characteristics of municipal police agencies identified by 40 years of police organizational research, and internal agency characteristics were most important in explaining variation in the organizations’ structural dimensions. The degree to which campus agencies have adopted organizational structures that are similar to those of municipal police is discussed and framed within an institutional perspective.