Want to Know the Morale of a Police Department? Ask the Cops

If someone asked me how to determine the morale of a police department, my first question would be simple. Who are you asking? If you are sitting down with the chief, deputy chief, captains, and members of the executive staff, you are going to learn something about the organization. You are going to hear about staffing, budgets, policies, recruiting, political pressure, community expectations, strategic planning, and all the other problems that come with running a police department. Those conversations have value. But if that is where the assessment stops, then you have not really measured the climate of the department. You have measured how the people running the department perceive the department. In reality, those are not necessarily the same thing.

I say that as someone who has spent years standing somewhere in the middle of that structure. The sergeant occupies an interesting place in policing because you are close enough to patrol that you still experience much of what your officers experience, but you are also part of the supervisory structure responsible for carrying out decisions made above you. There have been plenty of times during my career when I have walked into roll call knowing that I had to explain a decision I did not make. Sometimes I agreed with it. Sometimes I understood why it was made but also understood exactly why the officers were frustrated by it. Other times I disagreed with it completely, but my responsibility as a supervisor did not disappear simply because I disagreed. That is a place a lot of sergeants understand.

The officers look at you because you are their immediate supervisor. They want to know why something happened. They want to know why staffing changed, why a policy was interpreted a certain way, why someone was disciplined, why an assignment was handled differently, or why a decision that makes perfect sense in a command meeting makes almost no sense at two in the morning when three cars are tied up and calls are holding. At the same time, the people above you expect you to implement the decision and keep the shift functioning. Sometimes both sides have legitimate concerns. Sometimes one side has information the other side does not. Sometimes the sergeant is standing between two completely different experiences of the same police department.

That is one reason I believe sergeants and patrol officers should be among the first people consulted when someone wants to understand police morale and organizational climate.

Police departments have a chain of command, and information naturally changes as it moves up the chain. I do not necessarily mean someone intentionally hides something. It is usually much more subtle. An officer tells a sergeant what happened. The sergeant summarizes it for a lieutenant. The lieutenant brings part of it to a captain. Eventually something reaches command as a staffing issue, personnel concern, complaint, or paragraph in an email. The facts might survive that process, but the experience often does not.

The chief might hear that overtime is high. The patrol officer remembers missing another dinner with his family because nobody was available to relieve him. Command may see that a shift technically met minimum staffing. The sergeant remembers spending half the night deciding which calls could wait because two officers were tied up at the hospital and another officer was processing an arrest. Administration might see that a complaint was investigated and closed according to policy. The officer remembers spending several months wondering whether one decision was going to destroy a career built over fifteen years. Both realities can exist at the same time.

Research on police organizations supports something officers have understood for a long time. Internal fairness matters. Rosenbaum and McCarty surveyed 15,236 sworn officers from 88 American law enforcement agencies and found that more favorable perceptions of organizational justice were strongly associated with greater organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and compliance with agency rules. ¹ Their findings are important because police officers do not experience organizational culture through mission statements. They experience it through decisions, supervisors, discipline, opportunity, communication, and whether they believe the organization treats people fairly. That matters because police morale is often misunderstood.

Morale does not mean everyone is happy. I have never believed a police department should be run around the idea of keeping everyone happy. Police work does not operate that way. Supervisors have to make unpopular decisions. Officers sometimes need to be corrected. Discipline sometimes has to occur. People are going to lose assignments they wanted. Someone will work a holiday. Someone will get ordered in. Someone will disagree with a policy. Someone will believe they deserved a promotion they did not receive. None of that automatically means a department has poor morale.

What matters is whether people believe the process is legitimate. Was the decision fair? Were the standards consistent? Was the officer allowed to explain what happened? Did the same rules apply when somebody else made the same mistake? Were people told the truth? Did leadership explain the reasoning behind the decision, or were officers simply expected to accept it because the person giving the order had more rank? Those questions tell us a great deal about police department culture.

Research involving 868 United States Border Patrol agents provides another view of the same issue. Researchers examining organizational justice and workplace uncertainty found that agents experiencing greater uncertainty paid even more attention to fair treatment from supervisors when evaluating their job satisfaction. ² Fair supervision appeared to provide information about whether the organization could be trusted and whether it would support employees in the future.

That finding makes sense to me because uncertainty is already built into police work. Officers do not know what the next radio call is going to be. They do not know whether a traffic stop will remain routine. They do not know what will be waiting behind the door on a domestic call. When the police organization itself also begins to feel unpredictable, the stress is no longer coming only from outside the building.

I have watched officers handle horrific calls, angry citizens, fights, death notifications, crashes, violence, long shifts, and criticism without saying much. Then something happens internally that they perceive as unfair, and that becomes the thing they cannot let go of. People outside policing sometimes struggle to understand that. How can someone deal with tragedy for twenty years but become furious over an administrative decision? Because the officer expects adversity from the street. It feels different when they begin expecting it from inside their own police department.

One of the lessons I have learned as a supervisor is that officers can handle a lot when they believe the person leading them is being straight with them. I have had to tell officers things they did not want to hear. I have had to correct people I respected. I have had to explain why something could not happen the way an officer wanted it to happen. Sometimes I could solve their problem. Sometimes I could not. But there is a tremendous difference between telling someone, “I cannot fix this, but I will tell you exactly what I know,” and pretending their concern is not legitimate because acknowledging it would be inconvenient. People know the difference. They remember it too.

Research on police supervision supports why that relationship matters. Piotrowski, Rawat, and Boe studied police officers and found that supervisor support and supervisor justice positively predicted work engagement. Together, organizational support and organizational justice accounted for 26 percent of the variability in work engagement in their sample. ³ The study involved 170 officers in northern Poland, so I would not present it as a direct measurement of American policing. But when considered beside the American organizational justice research, it adds to the evidence that the immediate supervisor matters.

That reinforces something many sergeants already know. Officers may technically work for an organization, but much of their daily experience of that organization happens through the first-line supervisor standing in front of them.

Another mistake departments make is believing morale can be measured by how much complaining occurs. Every police department has people who complain. Some officers would complain if you handed them a winning lottery ticket because they had to pay taxes on it. There are employees who resist accountability. There are officers who interpret any expectation placed upon them as evidence leadership is against them. Sometimes what gets called a morale problem is really an individual who does not like being supervised. We have to be honest about that too.

But the opposite mistake is equally dangerous. If officers from different shifts, units, ranks, and levels of experience independently begin describing the same problem, leadership cannot dismiss all of it as negativity. At some point the repetition itself becomes information. One angry employee may tell you something about that employee. Ten people independently describing the same experience may be telling you something about the organization. That is where sergeants become particularly important.

A sergeant usually sees declining morale before there is a survey to measure it. It rarely announces itself. Instead, behavior changes gradually. The officer who volunteered for everything stops raising a hand. The person who used to bring ideas to supervisors decides it is easier to remain quiet. An experienced officer who once talked about testing for promotion suddenly says it is not worth it. Someone who enjoyed training new officers stops wanting trainees. Another officer begins asking friends what other departments are hiring. I have seen officers stop caring long before they ever leave.

That is one of the worst things that can happen inside a police organization because the officer may continue showing up every day. They still answer calls. They still write reports. They still meet the basic requirements of the job. On paper, nothing appears particularly wrong. But the department has lost something more valuable than attendance. It has lost effort and drive.

Research conducted in Pennsylvania is particularly interesting in this discussion. Julseth, Ruiz, and Hummer examined municipal police officers from 14 departments in south-central Pennsylvania and looked at job satisfaction in relation to administration, shift work, equipment, community support, departmental morale, policies, stress, and workload. Their results identified a relationship between stress and overall job satisfaction and examined departmental morale as part of that organizational picture. ⁴ The research is older and limited to one geographic area, so it should not be treated as representative of every police department. But the basic issue it identifies is still relevant. Working conditions and the internal organization matter.

More recent research points in the same direction. Contreras and Novaco examined sworn police officers and found that perceived organizational support moderated the effects of police work stress on burnout and life satisfaction. Officers who perceived greater organizational support showed a reduced relationship between work stress and negative outcomes. ⁵ Interestingly, perceived community support did not show the same moderating effect in that study. That finding should make us think harder about what police officer wellness actually means.

Law enforcement has spent years talking about resilience, peer support, mental health resources, sleep, physical fitness, stress management, and teaching officers how to better regulate themselves under pressure. I believe strongly in those things. I have spent a significant amount of my own professional life studying stress physiology and how human beings perform when they are under pressure.

But there is something incomplete about telling police officers they need to become more resilient while refusing to examine whether their own organization is unnecessarily wearing them down.

Individual resilience cannot make organizational unfairness disappear. Meditation does not make inconsistent leadership consistent. Breathing techniques can help someone regulate physiological activation, but they cannot manufacture trust in leadership. There comes a point when the organization has to examine itself rather than continuously teaching the individual how to tolerate the organization. Of course, resilience matters, but, more importantly, organizational responsibility matters too. This also brings us directly into police officer retention.

A department can spend enormous amounts of time and money recruiting new officers while ignoring why experienced people no longer want to stay. Recruitment and retention are connected, but they are not the same problem. If experienced officers are leaving because of organizational stress, inconsistent leadership, poor communication, perceived unfairness, or because they simply no longer believe in the organization, another recruiting campaign does not solve that problem. It replaces people without understanding why they left.

This is why I have never completely understood the way organizations wait until somebody resigns before becoming interested in what that person was experiencing. Then comes the exit interview. Why are you leaving? What could we have done differently? Was there something about the department that contributed to your decision?

Those are useful questions. They are also late. Why were we not asking them two years earlier? Ask the officer who is still here why they stopped volunteering. Ask the detective who used to love investigations why they are counting the months until they can transfer. Ask the sergeant why experienced officers no longer want to test for promotion. Ask newer patrol officers whether they can see themselves spending the next twenty years inside the organization. Do not wait for a resignation letter to become curious about police retention.

There is another problem when police departments try to assess their organizational climate. If you genuinely want people to speak honestly about morale, rank cannot dominate the room. Putting patrol officers in a meeting with the chief, deputy chief, captains, and lieutenants and then asking everybody to freely discuss department morale is not a serious assessment.

Most officers are going to calculate before they speak. They are going to think about promotions. They are going to think about specialty assignments. They are going to wonder whether what they say is going to follow them. They may remember what happened to somebody who spoke too freely years earlier. Maybe those concerns are justified. Maybe they are not. Either way, if officers believe honest criticism could hurt them professionally, that belief is going to affect what they tell you.

This is where anonymous police morale surveys, confidential interviews, outside facilitators, and separate conversations by rank can have real value. If a department genuinely wants to understand its organizational climate, it has to create conditions where people believe they can tell the truth. Most importantly, police leadership has to be willing to hear answers it does not like.

There is a difference between seeking feedback and seeking validation. If the only acceptable outcome of a morale assessment is confirmation that leadership is doing a good job, then do not waste everyone’s time conducting one.

Sometimes officers are wrong. Sometimes they do not possess all the information command possesses. Sometimes leadership made the right decision and communicated it terribly. Sometimes patrol sees something command simply cannot see from where they sit. And sometimes leadership is wrong. A mature police organization has to be capable of discovering all of those possibilities.

If I were evaluating the organizational climate of a police department, I would absolutely talk to the chief. I would want to understand the problems being faced at the executive level because those problems are real too. Police chiefs deal with budgets, politics, lawsuits, elected officials, unions, staffing, public expectations, and consequences most patrol officers never see. Then I would leave the chief’s office.

I would sit with the sergeants. I would talk to patrol officers from days, evenings, and nights. I would talk to younger officers and veteran officers. I would talk to people who promoted and people who have no desire to promote. I would talk to detectives. I would talk to dispatchers because they often hear and see parts of police department culture everybody else misses.

And I would ask better questions than, “How is morale?”

Do you believe standards are applied consistently here? Do you believe you can make an honest mistake without your career being destroyed? Does your immediate supervisor listen to you? Does that supervisor actually have the authority to solve problems? Are good officers recognized? Are poor performers held accountable? Do you believe specialty assignments and promotions are fair? Do you believe leadership tells you the truth? What happens when somebody respectfully disagrees with command? What is the problem everybody talks about privately but nobody wants to say publicly?

Then I would ask one question that I think reveals quite a bit about police morale, officer retention, and organizational culture. Would you recommend this police department to someone you care about? Then I would listen to the explanation.

I would not immediately tell the officer why their perception was wrong. I would not defend the organization. I would listen, because after enough conversations, the individual complaints begin to separate themselves from the organizational patterns. That is when police department culture becomes visible.

Organizational climate does not live inside a mission statement. It is not the language written in an accreditation binder. It is not a recruiting video or a department’s social media page. It is not whatever gets presented during a command staff meeting. It is what people experience when nobody is performing for the room.

It is what patrol officers say in their cruisers after a decision comes down. It is what sergeants hear when somebody closes the office door. It is what detectives talk about over coffee. It is what officers tell their spouses when they get home. It is what they say to officers from neighboring departments when they ask if anybody is hiring. That conversation is already happening whether leadership participates in it or not.

I have spent enough of my life in both the military and law enforcement. I was never really exposed to the corporate world. In the military and law enforcement world, rank can tell you many things. It can tell you who has authority. It can tell you who is responsible for a decision. It can tell you who signs the policy. Rank cannot tell you what people actually believe. For that, you have to ask them.

If you want to understand where the police department is going, talk to the chief. If you want to understand the administrative challenges, talk to executive staff. Their perspectives matter, and any legitimate assessment of organizational climate should include them.

But if you want to know what the police department actually feels like when the doors close, command staff goes home, and the midnight shift is answering calls with whatever staffing is left, go downstairs. Talk to the sergeant trying to hold the shift together and the patrol officer sitting in the cruiser. Then stop talking long enough to hear what they have been trying to tell you.

References

¹ Organizational Justice and Officer “Buy In” in American Policing, by Dennis P. Rosenbaum and William P. McCarty (Policing: An International Journal).

Read the journal article
National Institute of Justice record

² Why Does Organizational Justice Matter? Uncertainty Management Among Law Enforcement Officers, by Justin Nix, Scott E. Wolfe, Jeff Rojek, and Robert J. Kaminski (Journal of Criminal Justice).

Read the study

³ Effects of Organizational Support and Organizational Justice on Police Officers’ Work Engagement, by Andrzej Piotrowski, Samir Rawat, and Ole Boe (Frontiers in Psychology).

Read the full peer-reviewed paper
PubMed record

⁴ Municipal Police Officer Job Satisfaction in Pennsylvania: A Study of Organisational Development in Small Police Departments, by Jason Julseth, James Ruiz, and Don Hummer (International Journal of Police Science & Management).

Read the journal record
Penn State research record

⁵ Organizational Support Mitigates the Detrimental Effects of Police Work Stress on Burnout and Life Satisfaction, by Isaias M. Contreras and Raymond W. Novaco (Policing: An International Journal).

Read the journal record
DOI record

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Ayman Kafel is a patrol sergeant, combat veteran, and founder of Project Sapient, with more than 20 years of operational experience. He served in Iraq as a U.S. Army soldier and translator and has worked in law enforcement roles including SWAT, DEA task force work, and plainclothes interdiction; he also holds a master’s degree in counterterrorism. For The Havok Journal, he writes from that background on law enforcement, service, training, stress, resilience, and national security, often focusing on the physical and psychological demands of high-stress work. Follow Project Sapient on Instagram, YouTube, and all podcast platforms for engaging content. He can be reached at ayman@projectsapient.com.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.