Police innovation is frequently referenced in the policing literature, but it is less frequently defined, applied, or operationalized by scholars. This situation has led to definitional ambiguity and variation, which limits the development of innovation as a scientific construct. We present a conceptualization of innovation and classification of innovations through exploratory factor analysis with data collected from chiefs of police. Our findings suggest that chiefs weigh newness or novelty only partially when judging innovativeness. Chiefs also appear to classify innovativeness in terms of the utility that innovations provide to organizational operations. Our findings suggest a disconnect between prior literature and practitioners in how innovation is viewed, which hampers its conceptual development in the literature.

警务文献中经常提到警察创新，但是学者很少定义，应用或实施警察创新。这种情况导致了定义上的歧义和变化，这限制了创新作为科学结构的发展。我们通过探索性因素分析以及从警察局长那里收集的数据，提出了创新的概念和创新的分类。我们的研究结果表明，酋长在评判创新性时只会权衡部分新颖性或新颖性。酋长们似乎还根据创新对组织运营的作用来对创新进行分类。我们的发现表明，在如何看待创新方面，现有文献与实践者之间存在脱节，这阻碍了其在文献中的概念发展。