Answer

Program Initiation Plan

Implementation of the proposed project will go through various phases, with the initiation phase being one of the major phases. As the seventh stage of the planned change process, initiation planning involves bringing together all the information needed to implement the program and communicate important information to the key stakeholders to justify the program’s support, define its scope, and help the stakeholders to understand its direction from the outset. It also looks for possible weaknesses in the first six phases of the planned change process to enable planners to increase the program’s change of success. With this in mind, the purpose of this report is to prepare and present the initiation plan of the proposed in-service training program to the mayor of Fictionland, members of the Center for Justice, and the Chief of Police.

A summary of the Program

The program to be implemented by the Fictionland Police Department is a six-month in-service training program that will focus on enhancing the levels of professionalism among the department’s police officers by equipping them with the skills and knowledge needed to enable them to manage situations through social interaction and humanely rather than through aggression. The program is underpinned by the recognition of the police as being traditionally militarized, meaning they are inclined to be aggressive and violent when managing some situations (Brooks, 2020). The program targets police officers and their superintendents because they are the parties with increased contact with community members.

Action Plan

Effective implementation of the proposed in-service training program will call for various resources and their related costs as well as activities and tasks that will need to be completed during the implementation process. To begin with, staffers will be needed to coordinate the training sessions; they will comprise a training coordinator, a lead instructor, and instructors. Other vital resources that will be needed to facilitate training sessions and support the overall program are presentation tools, training manuals and handbooks, assessment tools, and access to the library for further reading and research purposes. It is estimated that staffing will cost approximately $5,000 per hour followed by presentation tools at $2,500, training manuals: $1,500, assessments and evaluations: 1,500, and handouts and study materials: $1,000. Since the program principally seeks to equip the department’s officers with the skills and knowledge they need to demonstrate professionalism in the way they deal with members of the community, the major activities that will be involved are training activities, practical interactions with community members on a weekly basis, and monthly assessment to evaluate how the participation in the program is impacting the officers’ behavior and level of professionalism.

Potential sources contributing to the problem

From the ongoing discussion (in previous assignments), the Fictionland Police Department has been highly criticized for engaging in and perpetuating police corruption, police harassment, and excessive use of force, and illegal profiling of minority ethnic groups. These community-police problems are engendered by various factors, of which major ones are legal protection, the militarization of police, and long history of racism and discrimination in legal order and policing. These three factors are responsible for the current community-police problems at the department for a number of reasons. First, as Wykstra (2020) noted, illegal protection of police officers through certain laws like the law of qualified immunity means that they have an advantage in investigations into their misconduct. They are also shielded from the prosecutions and other outcomes of legal proceedings, thereby allowing them to continue engaging in abusive behavior. Regarding militarization, police offers are traditionally trained to manage situations aggressively as opposed to social interaction with members of the public, and this influences their inclination to brutality and excessive use of force (Vitale, 2017).  Lastly, the longstanding history of racism and discrimination in the U.S policing and legal order tends to incentivize police officers in Fictionland to employ more stringent and violent strategies when dealing with ethnic minorities, which perpetuates illegal racial profiling (Williams & Murphy, 2010).    

Tools used to conduct an outcome evaluation

Conducting an outcome evaluation of the in-service police training program will be important to understand how well the program’s goals and intended outcomes were achieved. For instance, it will assess the extent to which participants changed their behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge, and determined whether the change was a result of their participation in the program. In this manner, the effectiveness and impacts of the program are outlined and communicated to funders and other relevant stakeholders. The tools that will be used to effectively conduct the evaluation can be classified into two broad categories: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative tools will include headcount (of police officers who improved their behavior), pre- and post-tests, data analysis, and comparison. Qualitative tools, on the other, hand, will include observations, surveys, interviews, and focus groups        

Measures of the program’s effectiveness for every objective

Developing baseline measures of the program’s effectiveness is necessary to ensure that all the individuals involved are working towards common goals and that the department’s resources are being put into proper use. Given the program’s objectives, the measures to evaluate its effectiveness will be as follows.

Objective 1: Improve the police officers’ level of professionalism

Measures:

• Number of police officers who completed the program
• Rates of reported police corruption
• Rates of illegal profiling of ethnic minorities in legal order and policing.

Objective 2: Equip police officers with skills needed for effective social interaction

Measures:

• Level of social interaction between the police and members of the community.
• Number of community members who can freely interact with police officers without fear.

Objective 3: Build a positive community-police relationship

Measures

• Number of people who contact the police to report crime incidents.
• Number of people who participate in community policing and cooperate in investigations.