June 2026
References
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Dunning, D.( 2011). The Dunning-Kruger Effect: On being ignorant of one ' s own ignorance. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 247 – 296. https:// doi. org / 10.1016 / B978-0-12-385522-0.00005-6
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D.( 1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one ' s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77( 6), 1121 – 1134. https:// doi. org / 10.1037 / 0022-3514.77.6.1121
National Institute of Justice.( 2023). Cognitive bias in law enforcement decision making. U. S. Department of Justice.
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Soll, J. B., Milkman, K. L., & Payne, J. W.( 2015). Outsmart your own biases. Harvard Business Review, 93( 5), 64 – 71. Walker, S., & Katz, C. M.( 2012). The police in America: An introduction. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
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This is not merely a theory. In policing, small and repeated performance failures often appear before larger problems surface. A department that waits for a major complaint, a serious use-of-force incident, or a lawsuit before examining an officer’ s work is no longer managing risk. It is reacting to the consequences of failing to manage it. A proper evaluation system gives administrators and supervisors the ability to detect those warning signs earlier and respond with training, counseling, closer supervision, or formal corrective action.
Evaluations matter so much in policing because police work is highly discretionary and highly varied. Patrol officers, detectives, school resource officers, supervisors, and command staff perform different functions and face different expectations. They should not all be rated from the same generic template. A credible evaluation system must be tied to the actual duties of the assignment and focus on observable job behavior. For a patrol officer, that may include legal decision making, report quality, communication, de-escalation, initiative, productivity, officer safety, and interactions with the public. For detectives, the focus may include case management, follow-up, evidence handling, victim communication, and courtroom preparation. For supervisors, the criteria should include review quality, coaching, accountability, and policy enforcement. An evaluation system that is not job-specific becomes little more than a paper exercise, and paper exercises do not reduce risk.
New Jersey already provides a useful comparison in another licensed public profession. In education, the state requires structured evaluations and corrective action plans for staff who receive low ratings. The lesson is not that teachers and police officers perform the same work. They do not. The lesson is that licensure and professional status alone are not enough. Performance must also be observed, documented, supported, and, when necessary, corrected. Policing should follow the same professional logic, even if the evaluation standards are tailored to law enforcement.
A strong police evaluation system should define competent performance for each rank and assignment, require ongoing supervisory observation rather than memory-based year-end scoring, produce narrative ratings supported by examples, trigger corrective action when performance falls below standard, and create a defensible record when an officer fails to improve. Without those features, agencies are left in a familiar position: supervisors know an officer is underperforming, coworkers know it, and eventually the public may feel the effects of it, but the department lacks the documentation and structure needed to intervene effectively. That is not merely an administrative weakness. It is a management failure with public safety consequences.
Another major concern is that many agencies are better equipped to investigate misconduct than to address chronic substandard performance before it becomes misconduct. Those are not the same issue. An officer may not yet have committed a criminal act or a licensure-disqualifying offense and still may be repeatedly failing in the basic expectations of the profession. Poor report writing, weak judgment, repeated carelessness, policy noncompliance, inability to manage conflict, and failure to complete essential duties all damage the organization and create foreseeable risk.
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