Analyzing the content of a police job can focus on worker duty or behavior, work outcomes, the special nature of the job, or worker characteristics. Methods of job analysis include using questionnaires, interviews, and observations of workers. However, the method of and approach to the job analysis should be determined by its purpose: for classifying a job or preparing a job description. Little research into the worth of the various methods has been done. Police have only recently been preparing and using job analyses, generally as a result of legal pressure to hire minorities to provide a basis for selecting officers, and to plan. The benefits to police in doing these analyses include, besides satisfying the legal requirements, providing administrators with data about task requirements and worker behavior, and assessing training. However, job analyses bias planning and hiring toward the status quo, because typical job analyses do not question whether the job should be performed as found. Although this problem may be ameliorated by focusing on the departments will limit the usefulness of job analyses and other planning tools. Footnotes are included.