A contemporary public affairs approach to changing and improving police services in Puerto Rico: the administration, organisation, and community triumvirate

In 2011, the Civil Rights Division within the US Department of Justice published a report that summarised an investigation of the Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD). The report states that the PRPD is broken in a number of critical and fundamental respects. Moreover, Puerto Rico has experienced a significant increase in violent crime over the past few years. To create a new public safety paradigm in Puerto Rico, this complex, extraordinary public issue requires a comprehensive public affairs framework. This article presents a multi-dimensional approach that discusses police services management research and a public affairs triumvirate that includes administrative, organisational, and community sciences. The concepts and theories of social control, the public administrative integrative and boundary-exchange process, governance, rational and open systems, contingency, institutional theory and isomorphic forces, social construction, community policing, organisational reframing, and a confirmatory model are presented in an effort to create a social architecture to guide and influence public safety policy and practice in Puerto Rico.