Centralised and Decentralised Models Of Police Organisational Design

This chapter reviews the comparative scholarship on centralised and decentralised models of police organisational design, with reference to the Indonesian National Police (Polri). It engages four dimensions of organisational design: structural arrangements, accountability mechanisms, performance outcomes, and the budgeting and resource-allocation architecture that supports them.  Drawing on fiscal federalism, plural policing, and comparative police-systems scholarship, the chapter argues that the cumulative comparative evidence supports a graduated devolution of authority within Polri, with national authority retained for functions characterised by significant interjurisdictional spillovers, technical specialisation, or national-security implications, and substantial subnational authority developed for community-facing policing.  The argument acknowledges substantive risks of decentralisation, including spatial inequality in service capacity, fragmentation of standards, exposure to local elite capture, and the potential politicisation of operational policing. These risks are addressed through governance design rather than through a default preference for continued centralisation. This capter is conceptual and document-based; it does not present new empirical evaluation of specific reform interventions, and its claims are accordingly probabilistic and conditional rather than predictive.