SHSU and LEMIT Finish Major Research Project for Regulatory Agency

SHSU and LEMIT Finish Major Research Project for Regulatory Agency

The Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT) at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) has completed a year-and-a-half-long project for the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE). In 2024, TCOLE engaged LEMIT to perform a job task analysis (JTA) of newly commissioned Texas peace officers to help the agency gain a better understanding of their main tasks, responsibilities and duties.

The project involved collaboration between LEMIT and SHSU’s Criminal Justice and Criminology and Management and Marketing departments.

“Supporting TCOLE on this effort is exactly what the legislature created us to do: provide practical, research-driven support to Texas law enforcement,” said John Ray, executive director of LEMIT. “Policing has changed since the last JTA was published in 1997. This project gets to the heart of what modern policing requires and ensures training reflects today’s realities, not those of 30 years ago.”

Alongside SHSU professors Huda Masood and Javier Ramos, LEMIT graduate research assistant and criminal justice doctoral student, Kayla Alaniz played an instrumental role in the project from the beginning. Her contributions involved identifying public JTAs from different states, transcribing focus group interviews and writing the executive summary for the final report. Given Alaniz’s interest in policing research, the hands-on experience from the project was a unique opportunity for her to work directly with practitioners and forge connections in the field.

“This was the first project where I could work directly with practitioners, knowing it would inform training or have some sort of impact,” Alaniz said. “I was grateful that we were able to wrap up while I’m still here, so I was involved from start to finish.”

With efforts led by Masood and Ramos, the project yielded two main sets of findings: one from focus group and interview sessions and another from web-based surveys. Focus groups and interviews with newly commissioned peace officers, field training officers and supervisors revealed core themes that define the scope of peace officers’ roles and responsibilities. These themes also informed the survey questions for entry-level peace officers and supervisors.

“Ultimately, we were able to confirm that overall, what police are doing today is pretty consistent with what they did in the past,” Ramos said. “While policing has evolved in the past 20 to 30 years, the main job duties today overlap with those revealed in 1997.”

Now that the project is complete, the LEMIT and SHSU research team looks forward to future collaborative opportunities with state agencies and beyond.

“We were able to provide TCOLE with a product that will hopefully get us more research opportunities in the future,” said Ramos. “One of the most rewarding outcomes of this project was being able to have SHSU’s name behind it.”

To read the full JTA report, visit the TCOLE website.