Special issue on police integrity: an introduction
Article Type: Editorial From: Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Volume 39, Issue 2.
I am pleased to introduce you to a special issue of the journal focusing on "Police Integrity," guest edited by Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovich and Maria R. Haberfeld. I can think of no more important subject today, especially in the USA, where the institution of policing is facing a major crisis of legitimacy. The integrity in policing is fundamentally important for maintaining legitimacy with the public given that the police are empowered in democratic societies to protect individual liberties and uphold the law in a fair and impartial manner. For these reasons police departments have a code of ethics and an "Oath of Honor" (e.g. "I will never betray my badge, my integrity, my character, or the public trust"). In many countries, the police are required by law to treat all people equally, and, furthermore, when they act in an ethical manner by being fair and respectful to the public, numerous studies have shown that they gain the trust and cooperation of the people they serve (see Jackson et al., 2012; Mazerolle et al., 2012; Tyler and Fagan, 2008).
The loss of public confidence in the police has been a repetitive cycle for more than a century in the USA. Following widespread police brutality and political corruption in the nineteenth century (Walker, 1977), serious efforts were made to reform and "professionalize" the American police in the twentieth century. Periodic efforts to introduce new management structures, policies and procedures, training, technology, and new forms of accountability and oversight have helped to restrict extreme forms of misconduct, but police integrity problems have continued in one form or another. The types of misconduct that make the headlines (e.g. brutality or unjustified use of force) are extremely rare, and, in fact, US police used or threatened force in less than 2 percent of contacts (Durose and Eith, 2011). However, integrity problems can cover a wide range of nonviolent police actions that are more common, including disrespectful or discourteous demeanor and race bias, and others that are more serious and less frequent such as bribery, theft, and perjury. In any case, these are violations of departmental policy, the law and/or the moral standards of society.
If left unchecked, such unethical behavior can become the norm rather than the exception. There is little question that police officers, because of the power vested in them by the government, the lack of supervisory oversight inherent in their job, and their frequent contact with law violators, are given many opportunities to misuse their authority (Sherman, 1974; Skolnick, 1975). As a result, there have been many outside investigations and commissions over the past century to investigate blatant problems of corruption or misconduct, and researchers have studied these issues for many years.
The problem of police ethics and integrity is not unique to the USA, as the articles in this special issue will attest. The current research is especially important for establishing the patterns of integrity that exist across many different countries, agency types, incidents, work groups, and employee characteristics. This work helps to define the scope and seriousness of the problem, as well as factors that can help to constrain the problem and encourage greater integrity in police organizations.
There are several large obstacles that prevent us from fully understanding, detecting, and responding to a lack of integrity in policing. First, there is the absence of a standard definition of the construct, which makes it difficult to measure the nature and extent of the problem. For decades, we talked about police corruption, which Goldstein defined as "acts involving the misuse of authority by a police officer in a manner designed to produce personal gain for himself or for others" (Goldstein, 1975, p. 3); others saw corruption as one form of misconduct or police deviance (Barker and Carter, 1991). More recently, Carl Klockars and his colleagues have offered an overarching perspective that focusses on police integrity, defined as "the normative inclination among police to resist temptations to abuse the rights and privileges of their occupation" (Klockars et al., 2006). This integrity framework can be found throughout this special issue.
Second, the nature and extent of the problem is very hard to measure because historically, policing has occurred within a culture defined by secrecy, suspicion, and group loyalty. Beginning in 1972 with the Knapp Commission in New York City and many subsequent commissions, community leaders have lamented the "Code of Silence" as a major obstacle to investigating and preventing police corruption. The persistent "Blue Curtain" has prevented officers from reporting misconduct among peers, and few executives want to admit that his/her agency houses corruption. Furthermore, in today's litigious society and political environment where the police are under continuous scrutiny, no officer is inclined to talk about his or her own misconduct or admit doing anything that might violate policy or the law. Short of costly ethnographic immersion in the culture, these hurdles present enormous challenges for researchers, but the authors in this special issue have made significant progress in defeating them to advance our understanding of unethical behavior within police organizations.
Third, guiding theories of integrity (and associated methods of theory testing) have also been in short supply or in conflict. The study of integrity and misconduct has been a battlefield for psychological and sociological theories of deviance. The individual approach, often called "bad apple" theory, focusses on corrupt or problem-prone individuals that need to be identified, screened out, retrained, or removed. While this model has merit, is gives insufficient attention to systemic, organizational factors that may be contributing to the problem of misconduct. In contrast, the group approach adopted by many of the authors in this collection of articles targets the organizational and occupational culture of policing. Building on the work of Herman Goldstein (1975) and others, Klockars, Kutnjak Ivkovi, and Haberfeld have advanced an organizational theory of integrity with a particular measurement system that overcomes some of the major limitations of prior research on police corruption (Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovi, 2004; Klockars et al., 2006). Ingeniously, they have circumvented the "The Code" by asking employees about their organization and culture and not about their own deviance. Asking about one's own deviance (as criminologists have done with juvenile delinquency and drug use research)is much more problematic when survey respondents are police officers, who are particularly sensitive to disclosure.
The organizational theory of police integrity that provides the framework for most of the articles in this issue has four key dimensions (Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovi, 2004; Klockars et al., 2000): first, organizational rules: does the agency make and communicate its policies and rules about misconduct in a way that officers know and understand them? Second, control mechanism: does the agency have strong systems in place to detect and discipline officers who violate policies and rules? Third, the "Code of Silence": how widespread in "the code" (officers' willingness to report coworkers) and what have organizations done to curtail it? and fourth, public expectations: what are the social, economic, and political environments that create local public expectations regarding ethically appropriate police behavior?
Many of these dimensions are captured in the measures of integrity used by authors in this special issue. Specifically, a survey is administered to officers that provides a range of hypothetical scenarios involving police misconduct (e.g. vignettes involving corruption, excessive force, planting evidence, falsifying records). For each scenario, the respondent answers a series of questions about his/her knowledge of agency rules, the seriousness of the rule-violating behavior in question, the discipline that should be given for such actions, the discipline that will likely be given, and the subject's own willingness to report such misconduct. This "survey of integrity" provides a standardized system of measurement about officers' knowledge, attitudes, and intentions that allows researchers to evaluate the cultural and organizational tolerance of misconduct within particular agencies or subgroups within agencies. In a groundbreaking study of 30 police agencies in the USA, this research team found sizeable differences in police integrity across agencies (Klockars et al., 2000). The methodology has since been used in nearly 30 countries (see Kutnjak Ivkovi, 2015).
Despite this body of work, our knowledge is still limited regarding the conditions that influence police integrity as defined in this paradigm. Much of the earlier work reported data aggregated across scenarios, so the characteristics of misconduct have not been fully explored. Also, there is much to be learned about the micro, meso, and macro factors that shape police integrity, including the generalizability of these more specific conditional variables. This special issue is devoted to answering these questions.
Early research within this paradigm established that different type of misconduct varied in perceived seriousness and that the level of proposed discipline and willingness to report the incident increased with severity (Klockars et al., 2000). The first set of papers in this special issue extend this body of research by exploring the individual, social, organizational, and community factors that influence officers' perceptions of integrity and misconduct.
In the first paper, Hickman, Piquero, Powell, and Greene use the methodology pioneered by Klockars and colleagues in one large city police department (Philadelphia) to reach beyond the standard agency-level cultural assessment and test a multi-level theory of integrity, looking for "meso-level" (precinct/district) and "micro-level" (officer) variation in integrity. With survey data from 499 officers, they found that officer-level differences in integrity were minimal after controlling for the perceived seriousness of the incident, but they uncovered substantial district-level differences in willingness to report fellow officers. This work provides an important new direction for understanding the complexity of integrity within larger police agencies, where distinctive integrity subcultures can arise around different leadership styles and social norms of the group. In terms of policy, the authors note that early intervention and other programs may have limited benefits if they do not consider differences in integrity between work groups. This paper also does an excellent job of exploring a number of innovative ways of measuring police integrity in the future. This paper focussed on one physical abuse scenario, so whether these differences would be found with other types of misconduct must await future research.
Kutnjak Ivkovi and Sauerman give attention to macro level differences in police integrity by comparing survey results from 871 officers from three different types of South African police agencies: the large, centralized South African Police Service, and several local and smaller agency types – two municipal police agencies and one traffic police agency. Their examination of integrity was thorough, covering 11 scenarios each followed by seven questions about the officers views on seriousness, appropriate and expected discipline and willingness to report the misconduct. On the whole, the authors found similar views of seriousness and willingness to report across the different agency types, although a few important differences were detected (e.g. verbally abusing citizens and covering up police DUI and accidents was viewed as more serious by traffic police than by the metro police). Most importantly, the authors uncovered real differences in the approaches to discipline across agency types, indicating that the same acts of misconduct were being treated differently across jurisdictions within the same country of South Africa.
Lim and Sloan expand this work by testing theories at different levels – what they call the "rotten apples" theory (individual factors), "rotten barrels" theory (agency factors) and "rotten orchard" (community factors). Importantly, the authors examine integrity from the viewpoint of supervisors and commanders rather than line personnel. Management personnel are in a unique position to prevent or promote a culture of misconduct, yet they are rarely studied as a group. Using 17 scenarios from the integrity measurement system, Lim and Sloan queried 553 supervisors and commanders from municipal police, county sheriffs, and constable agencies across Texas, looking at individual, organizational, and ecological factors that influenced whether they would report fellow officers ("blow the whistle") on misconduct. They found some evidence that individual-level characteristics of supervisors influenced willingness to report. Specifically, those with a bachelor's or higher degree were more willing to blow the whistle on misconduct than less educated supervisors. However, the strongest evidence supported the "rotten barrel" theory, as the presence of a "deviant climate" (where peers see the behavior as less serious and are less likely to report)places a damper on whistle blowing across agency types. The "rotten orchard" theory" (measured by crime rates) was not supported.
In the next article, Kutnjak Ivkovi, Cajner Mraovic, and Borovec also give rare attention to the fourth dimension of the theory – the public expectations as defined by community characteristics. Looking at police integrity in the centralized system of policing in Croatia, the question is whether local community characteristics have any influence on the views of 945 Croatian police officers when the officers are regulated by standardized internal procedures and policies across agencies. The results indicate that officers working in smaller rural areas perceived misconduct as more serious than officers in larger urban agencies, suggesting that informal social controls are more powerful in rural areas where the community knows the officers. Overall, however, community characteristics (defined largely by crime rates) were no match for internal organizational factors, especially the officers' knowledge of the rules about misconduct or peers perceptions of seriousness. The authors suggest that future research should consider using community characteristics with greater variability across agencies.
Notwithstanding the benefits of the model promoted by Klockars et al. the next article by Hickman, Austin Powell, and Piquero explores an alternative approach to understanding police integrity, building on the "attitudes toward ethical behavior" scale by Hickman et al. (2016). This rival approach seeks to understand individual differences in ethics and integrity rather than organizational differences. Using the Philadelphia data cited earlier, the authors find that officers' perceptions of seriousness (using the Klockars et al. method) is indeed predictive of officers' willingness to report fellow officers (as many studies have shown), but as the seriousness of the misconduct increases, the Hyams scale does a better job of predicting reporting behavior than does the Klockars et al. approach. The Hyams scale is based on Kohlberg's (1976) theory of moral development, which may help to explain why individual officers are more or less likely to report fellow officers, depending on their level of moral sophistication. This article moves us in the direction of exploring the antecedents of integrity, which likely involves many stages of moral development.
To this point, the articles have mostly focussed on differences in officers views of misconduct between police agencies or between smaller units of analysis (work groups or individuals within agencies). In the next article, Kutnjak Ivkovi, Haberfeld, Kang, Peacock, and Sauerman examine differences in the threat of discipline for misconduct across four countries – Croatia, South Africa, South Korea, and the USA (total n=2,872). The authors found sizable differences between these countries in expected discipline that officers would receive for various types of misconduct, however dismissal was not an expected outcome for most incidents. Testing the fourth component of the model, they did not find that each country's level of integrity (measured by Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index) was related to disciplinary expectations among the police. Rather, expected discipline was influenced primarily by whether the behavior was a violation of the agency's rules, not society's integrity. The authors provide a strong review of the international comparative literature.
The second half of this special issue is devoted largely to an analysis of the code of silence in police culture and the factors that contribute to it, with two focussing on gender issues. After visible police scandals, policy makers routinely complain about the code of silence, yet research about the code or how to break it is rare. The first article in this series by Kutnjak Ivkovic, Peacock, and Haberfeld seeks to define the features of the code and its relationship to perceptions of discipline by surveying 604 officers and supervisors from 11 US police departments. Consistent with prior research, their findings indicate that support for the code varies by type of incident and seriousness, and that supervisors and officers hold similar perceptions. However, the supervisor code is narrower than the officer code, with agreement between the two groups occurring with the most serious forms of misconduct. Arguably, the most important finding from this study pertains to the fairness of discipline as a factor that affects the size of the code of silence. Consistent with the justice model, officers who felt that the discipline in their agency was too harsh (when compared to those who felt discipline was fair) were more likely to report that they would follow the code, i.e., not report fellow officers. The implication for management is that pushing for harsher discipline could backfire and result in widening the code of silence rather than serving as a deterrent to misconduct.
The next paper by Porter and Prenzler also looks at the code of silence, but explores how personal and social norms are linked and how they contribute to officers' unwillingness to report misconduct. We also learn what types of misconduct are most under-reported in Australia (e.g. rudeness, excessive force and gratuities). Surveys of 845 Australian police officers revealed that non-reporters falsely believe they are similar to other officers in their assessment of seriousness, when in fact they rate the scenarios as less serious than other officers. The authors suggest that officers' non-reporting is driven by what is called the "False Consensus Effect" or overemphasizing ones similarity to others. This perceptual bias can have adverse effects, but at a minimum, in this context it indicates that under-reporters are basing their decisions on inaccurate information about organizational norms. The authors emphasize the need for better communication of organizational values and being supportive of ethical decisions to do the right thing.
The next two papers look at gender differences in the code of silence. Prior research has been unable to paint a clear picture on this subject, showing contradictory or mixed results. Lobnikar, Prislan, uvan, and Meško surveyed 408 frontline Slovenian police officers (12.7 percent female) using the Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovi methodology. Interestingly, the results indicate that female officers were less willing than their male counterparts to report police misconduct in seven of the 14 scenarios, ranging from taking a bribe to excessive force. The strongest predictor of females' willingness to reporting was the perception that other officers would report, followed next by the perceived seriousness of the misconduct. These findings differ from those of a previous national study in Slovenia cited by the authors (Pagon et al., 2004), where three scenarios showed females more willing to report than males. The authors suggest the latest findings may stem from a salient loss of opportunities for women in policing over the previous 15 years, thus generating cynicism among female officers.
The next article by Vallmuur also examined gender effects in a limited study of 109 officers in the Estonian Public Order Police (27.5 percent female). The author did find some differences between male and female officers in their willingness to report peers, depending on the type of incident. Females were less willing than males to report misconduct involving the use of ones' position for gain, but more willing to report excessive force. In general, women consistently viewed the incidents as more serious than did men, while men showed variation by type of incident. Together, these two studies do not reveal any consistent pattern on gender differences in the code of silence, and this may be due to the relatively small sample sizes or the unmeasured complexity of the differences. More often than not, female and male officers did not differ in their perceptions of misconduct.
Finally, this issue includes an article that breaks with the tradition of Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovi and pursues a different theory and methodology to examine misconduct among police supervisors. Criminology theories are typically used to explain juvenile delinquency, but rarely adult deviance, especially among police officers. In this article, Donner, Maskaly, and Fridell decided to utilize Hirschi's (1969) social control theory for the first time to explain supervisory misconduct in policing. According to this theory, people are more likely to conform to pro-social norms (and less likely to be deviant) when they are strongly bonded to pro-social institutions and individuals, such as family, school, and work, which represent agents of informal social control. Essentially, bonded individuals have more to lose by being deviant from the group than individuals who are not socially bonded. As part of the National Police Research Platform, the authors surveyed 101 first-line supervisors and queried them about their likelihood of engaging in four different types of misconduct in the future. Supporting social control theory, the results indicate that supervisors with higher social bonds were less willing to engage in three types of misconduct. Using the language of social control theory, the authors conclude, "police supervisors, who are attached to pro-social individuals, who are committed to pro-social institutions, and who have a belief in abiding by society's rules and laws are less likely to jeopardize their stakes in conformity through workplace deviance."
In summary, this special issue brings new insights, theories, and in-depth analyses to the problem of police misconduct and integrity. These studies from around the world were able to test and confirm the generalizability of patterns reported in prior research. This work confirms that organizations around the globe show considerable differences in integrity within their workforce cultures and that the code of silence is alive and well. In addition, this research goes much further to identify the micro, meso, or macro factors that influence police misconduct. Individual, small group, agency, and larger contextual factors can impact police integrity.
This work advances our knowledge, but also identifies gaps in our knowledge and methods that need additional attention. In my view, more work is needed on the etiology of police misconduct. This research has wet our appetite for a closer look at the antecedents of misconduct. I would encourage researchers to show creativity in testing alternative theories to explain why officers engage in deviance, including criminological and organizational theories. Also, multi-level interactions should be tested. As I tell my students, behavior=person×environment. Also, better measures of community characteristics are needed to provide a fairer test of societal influences on integrity. A stronger test of gender differences, with larger samples, would be important, given some evidence in other studies reported here that female officers were more willing to break the code of silence and/or viewed misconduct incidents as more serious than male officers.
Finally, this work has important policy implications that should be considered, some of which I mentioned earlier. In light of inaccurate information about social norms, policies, and disciplinary practices, new directions in training and leadership could seek to increase officers' awareness of the rules and policies as well as the systems in place for controlling policy or law violations. Leadership should communicate accurate information about how discipline works and counter any misinformation about discipline and non-reporting. The current research reminds us that police officers, like all humans, are social beings who value social support and desire to conform to what they perceive as group norms. They will report misconduct if they believe that others in the group will report it and others think it is serious. Executives and supervisors should underscore that integrity is a core value in policing and why it is important. They should seek to create a work environment where employees feel free to report misconduct without repercussions.
Furthermore, given that social bonds are important for inhibiting misconduct, agencies should rethink pre-employment screening to hire individuals with strong social bonds. Also given that commitment to the organization is an important preventative factor, police executives should explore new ways to strengthen job commitment and job satisfaction through "organizational justice" (Rosenbaum, 2014), such as fair discipline, opportunities for career advancement, valuing employee input and ideas, and other avenues.
Dennis P. Rosenbaum - University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
References
Barker, T. and Carter, D.L. (Eds) (1991), Police Deviance, Anderson, Cincinnati, OH
Durose, M. and Eith, C. (2011), "Contacts between police and the public, 2008", Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 234599, available at: www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2229 (accessed April 18, 2016)
Goldstein, H. (1975), Police Corruption: A Perspective on its Nature and Control, The Police Foundation, Washington, DC
Hickman, M.J., Piquero, A.R., Powell, Z.A. and Greene, J. (2016), "Expanding the measurement of police integrity", Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Vol. 39 No. 2, pp. 246-267
Hirschi, T. (1969), Causes of Delinquency, University of California Press, Berkley, CA
Jackson, J., Bradford, B., Hough, M., Myhill, A., Quinton, P. and Tyler, T.R. (2012), "Why do people comply with the law? Legitimacy and the influence of legal institutions", British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 52 No. 6, pp. 1051-1071
Klockars, C.B. and Kutnjak Ivkovi, S. (2004), "Measuring police integrity", in Piquero, A.R., Greene, J.R. and Hickman, M.J. (Eds), Police Integrity and Ethics, Wadsworth Publishing, Belmont, CA, pp. 1.3-1.20
Klockars, C.B., Kutnjak Ivkovi, S. and Haberfeld, M.R. (2006), Enhancing Police Integrity, Springer, New York, NY
Klockars, C.B., Kutnjak Ivkovi, S., Harver, W.E. and Haberfeld, M.R. (2000), "The measurement of police integrity (research in brief)", US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC
Kohlberg, L. (1976), "Moral stages and moralization", in Lickona, T. (Ed.), Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research and Social Issues, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, NY
Kutnjak Ivkovi, S. (2015), "Studying police integrity", in Kutnjak Ivkovi, S. and Haberfeld, M. (Eds), Police Integrity Across the World, Springer, New York, NY
Mazerolle, L., Bennett, S., Manning, M., Ferguson, P. and Sargeant, E. (2012), "Legitimacy in policing: a systematic review of procedural justice", Campbell Crime and Justice Group, ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Brisbane
Pagon, M., Lobnikar, B. and Anelj, D. (2004), "Gender differences in leniency towards police misconduct", in Mesko, G., Pagon, M. and Dobovsek, B. (Eds), Policing in Central and Eastern Europe: Dilemmas of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Faculty of Criminal Justice, University of Maribor, Ljubliana, pp. 1-16
Rosenbaum, D.P. (2014), "A look at 'organizational justice' inside law enforcement agencies", presentation at the annual meeting of the Western Society of Criminology, Honolulu, HI
Sherman, L.W. (1974), Police Corruption: A Sociological Perspective, Anchor Press, Garden City, NY
Skolnick, J.H. (1975), Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in a Democratic Society, John Wiley and Sons Inc., New York, NY
Tyler, T.R. and Fagan, J. (2008), "Legitimacy and cooperation: why do people help the police fight crime in their communities?", Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 6, pp. 231-275
Walker, S. (1977), A Critical History of Police Reform: The Perils of Professionalism, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA
Further reading
Kutnjak Ivkovi, S. and Haberfeld, M. (2015), "A comparative perspective on police integrity", in Kutnjak Ivkovi, S. and Haberfeld, M. (Eds), Police Integrity Across the World, Springer, New York, NY
