Trojanowicz's definition is a useful tool for measuring commitment because of its comprehensiveness. It is one of the few attempts to concisely define community policing. The scale we developed measured the degree that departments institutionalized community policing into their procedures and structure. We made our first significant discovery when examining the distribution of the commitment scores. The aggregated scores composed a normal distribution.
Scores cluster around the middle of the scale and decline as they approached the extreme.
In other words, most departments exhibit a mid-range of commitment to community policing with high and low levels of commitment equally likely. This means that few departments fully integrate all the community policing measures into their organizational procedures and structure. A second scale was devised to measure departments' propensity for using bureaucratic structures and techniques in their operating procedures. This variable examined the use of written rules, planning of the work process, training and maintaining the chain of command. The more a department used these traditional management techniques, the higher it scored on the bureaucratic scale.