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Risk Management Risk management programs have been a part of local government organizations for years. Their purpose is to minimize organizational exposure to risk, including employee injuries. Although local governments generally have risk management programs that work with police, relatively few large police agencies have their own. In a 2005 telephone survey of police agencies, author Carol Archbold, professor, Department of Criminal Justice and Political Science at North Dakota State University, learned that agencies identifed risk management as a tool to control liability within their organizations (Archbold, 2005). Risk management was discussed at two OSW meetings. In the frst discussion, Toronto, Canada's police service risk management program was presented for consideration. That city's risk management unit is a part of the professional standards function within the "corporate command" area of the agency. The unit addresses risk management from these perspectives: • Risk of offcer • Risk of public/to public • Risk to organization • Damage to organization • Civil suits In the second risk management discussion, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Malcolm Sparrow was asked to share his thinking about and experience in dealing with harm reduction and risk management. In the introduction of his most recent book The Character of Harms: Operational Challenges in Control, Sparrow urges the regulatory community to "pick important problems and fix them" (Sparrow, 2008). He goes on to say: "However simple that sounds, it turns out that organizing around carefully selected and important pieces of a risk—rather than around traditional programmatic or functional tasks, or around core high-volume operational processes—is extraordinarily hard to do. Even if they manage to do it once for something special, many organizations have no place for such conduct within their routine operations," (Sparrow, 2008). Sparrow discussed the design choices in risk management: how to (a) define, (b) divide, (c) distribute, and (d) carry out the work of controlling harms, and he also presented choices that can be used to help control and reduce harm from officer injuries and death. Click on EInfo at - www.lawandordermag.com reader service #35 www.lawandordermag.com 85