Is Police Misconduct Contagious? Non-trivial Null Findings from Dallas, Texas

Objectives Understanding if police malfeasance might be “contagious” is vital to identifying efficacious paths to police reform. Accordingly, we investigate whether an officer’s propensity to engage in misconduct is associated with her direct, routine interaction with colleagues who have themselves engaged in misbehavior in the past. Methods Recognizing the importance of analyzing the actual social networks spanning a police force, we use data on collaborative responses to 1,165,136 “911” calls for service by 3475 Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers across 2013 and 2014 to construct daily networks of front-line interaction. And we relate these cooperative networks to reported and formally sanctioned misconduct on the part of the DPD officers during the same time period using repeated-events survival models. Results Estimates indicate that the risk of a DPD officer engaging in misconduct is not associated with the disciplined misbehavior of her ad hoc, on-the-scene partners. Rather, a greater risk of misconduct is associated with past misbehavior, officer-specific proneness, the neighborhood context of patrol, and, in some cases, officer race, while departmental tenure is a mitigating factor. Conclusions Our observational findings—based on data from one large police department in the United States—ultimately suggest that actor-based and ecological explanations of police deviance should not be summarily dismissed in favor of accounts emphasizing negative socialization, where our study design also raises the possibility that results are partly driven by unobserved trait-based variation in the situations that officers find themselves in. All in all, interventions focused on individual officers, including the termination of deviant police, may be fruitful for curtailing police misconduct—where early interventions focused on new offenders may be key to avoiding the escalation of deviance.

The Aftermath

Chapter 4 traces the aftermath of the formulation of the Judges’ Rules over the period 1918–60 including their reissue and additional interpretations of 1930, 1946, and 1947. In this account the technical disarray over the meaning of the Rules is analysed and the consequences for policing practices. There is an emphasis both upon the impact upon police culture, particularly within the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) from its origins in 1878, and the emergence and intensification of various forms of police deviance and corruption. The chapter links these developments to the experiences of suspects subjected to police questioning practices alongside, in the age of capital punishment, accounts of early cases of miscarriages of justice including that of Timothy Evans for murders committed by John Reginald Christie. In the face of Home Office resistance, public pressure eventually forced the establishment of a Royal Commission on the Police (1962) and a separate review of the Judges’ Rules (1964).

Applying Social Exchange Theory to Police Deviance: Exploring Self-Protective Behaviors Among Police Officers

Social exchange theory is one of the prominent paradigms used to explain the processes linking organizational treatment of employees to their job performance. However, the theoretical link between perceived organizational treatment and police deviance has not been fully explored. This research addresses this gap by analyzing the relationship between perceptions of organizational justice and the use of police self-protective behaviors (SPBs) using organizational support and organizational indifference as ad hoc indicators of the social exchange process. Data were collected using an online self-report survey distributed to police officers in a southern state who are members of a police officer association ( n = 1,861). Consistent with previous social exchange research, the findings generally support the idea that fairness is related to SPBs, but largely to the extent that it enhances the social exchange in terms of increasing perceptions of organizational support and reducing perceptions of organizational indifference, which both directly affect an officer’s use of SPBs, and are a type of police deviance. Specific findings, relevant policy implications, and directions for future research are discussed.

Organizational correlates of police deviance

PurposeMany examinations of police misconduct involve case study methodologies applied to a single agency, or a handful of agencies. Consequently, there is little evidence regarding the types of misconduct across agencies, or the impact of department-level characteristics on the nature and prevalence of officer deviance. The purpose of this paper is to address this research gap using statewide data of over 1,500 charges of police misconduct filed with the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board (AZPOST) from 2000 to 2011.Design/methodology/approachThis study examines variation in the prevalence and forms of misconduct across 100+ agencies based on agency type and size. Difference scores were calculated for every agency in the state to determine whether an agency’s level of misconduct was proportionate to the number of officers employed by that agency. AZPOST data were supplemented with Law Enforcement Management and Statistics data to identify organizational correlates of misconduct in agencies generating disproportionately low and high levels of misconduct.FindingsResults identify variation in officer misconduct across different types of agencies. Tribal agencies generally experience higher rates of domestic violence and drug/alcohol-related incidents. Smaller agencies have more misconduct allegations involving supervisors. Organizational characteristics including pre-hiring screening, accountability mechanisms and community relationships are associated with lower levels of agency misconduct.Originality/valueThe use of AZPOST data enables a statewide examination of misconduct while accounting for organizational context. This study identifies organizational features that might serve to protect agencies against disproportionate rates of officer misbehavior.

Police CEOs and subordinates’ perceptions of workplace misconduct

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether homophily – whereby people are influenced by those perceived as similar to themselves – affects attitudes toward police misconduct. Specifically, whether demographic dissimilarity between police chief executive law enforcement officers (CEOs) and subordinates is related to differences in perceptions of misconduct. Design/methodology/approach The data for this research are drawn from the National Police Research Platform. Multilevel mixed-effects regression modeling is used to analyze data from 78 randomly selected US police agencies (78 law enforcement CEOs and 10,709 officers from those agencies). Findings The main finding is that demographic dissimilarity between the CEO and subordinates is associated with differences in attitudes about police deviance, net of other factors. Practical implications The results exemplify the need to diversify police agencies at all levels, not just the lower ranks. Because employees were found to be more similar to those one step (up or down) from one another on the organizational hierarchy, diversifying at all levels of the police organizations will help to reduce the social distance between those in closer ranks, which could ameliorate the dissimilarity effect. Likewise, police agencies may need to adopt new management strategies to compensate for a diversifying workforce. Originality/value This study builds on previous research and investigates an understudied topic in the policing literature by assessing the extent to which dissimilarity is related to attitudinal congruence about workplace deviance in police organizations.