"I'm sorry, Colonel, but we've looked at this idea of computerizing patrol report writing, and we think it can't be done."

"Well, do it anyhow," Colonel G.H. Kleinknecht, the superintendent of police of St. Louis County, Missouri, is reported to have replied.

The dissident's mistake was not in arguing with Colonel Kleinknecht about whether it was possible to find a better way to get reports from police officers—he insists on debate as a matter of management principle—but rather in asserting that the idea would not work without having another suggestion about how to solve the problem. That kind of response offends Kleinknecht almost as much as the waste, delay, and duplication that he found in the department's "information products," as he calls them, when he took over in 1973.

Efficiency and effectiveness are important to Kleinknecht, a former police management consultant turned law enforcement executive who is proud of the fact that he did not come up through the police ranks. "Colonel" just happens to be the title conferred on the head of the St. Louis County police department.

Kleinknecht recounts the way the department used to handle traffic tickets with a touch of disgust in his voice. "We had one person who did nothing but notarize traffic tickets all day long. `Why are you doing that?' I asked. `Because the prosecutor says so,' the worker responded." The next day Kleinknecht told the woman's supervisor to give her some other kind of work to do; no longer would the department notarize tickets. "Four months later," he said, "the prosecutor noticed this and complained. He couldn't show us a reason for having to notarize traffic tickets other than that is what had always been done."