Supervising Police Personnel, Fifth Edition

Rating:
Summary: Doing what to whom?
Review: This purchase was made out of necessity due to an upcoming promotional examination. I will preface my remarks by saying I have only read four chapters. I am dreading the next eleven chapters but I will keep an open mind. The author, Paul Whisenand, Ph.D., does not give any information in the dedication or preface to indicate what his qualifications are for writing about police supervision other than the fact that he is a member of the Department of Criminal Justice at California State University, Long Beach. By searching on the internet I found that he is a 'former police officer' and 'reserve deputy sherriff' but it does not say where. So far I see nothing to indicate that the content of this book has any relation to police supervision.
For anyone who has studied in the social sciences the writing style will be very familiar. The layout of the information is very poor and it is difficult to tell when he is moving from one subject to another. He makes a lot of use of indented text boxes with statements enclosed that don't seem to bear any importance on the subject matter. There are no references in the book at all which makes me very wary of the material. Is it all truly original thought from Whisenand? In chapter three he used 3 Mission statements from police departments with no reference as to where he found them, when they were issued and whether or not he got permission to use them. Most departments contract out their promotional testing processes and I guess this creates a market for over-priced books for the testing companies to draw their pool of questions from. The diabolical thing is that they seem to be in a money-making scheme with the authors and publishers by updating these books on a continuous basis. Let's face it, the only reason anyone would read this book is because they have to for a promotional test. With that in mind, this book is written very poorly in terms of picking out the material that is 'test question worthy'.