Explaining Police Corruption among Mexican Police Officers through a Social Learning Perspective

ABSTRACT

This study examines the causes of corruption among Mexican police officers through the lens of social learning theory. Self-administered questionnaires were used to gather information about behavior of corruption, economic situation, job dissatisfaction, lack of commitment, and definitions and reinforcement favorable to corruption among a sample of Mexican police officers. Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis was used to determine whether differential reinforcement and definitions help to explain levels of corruption among sampled police officers. Results show that positive definitions and reinforcement towards corruption are significant predictors of police corruption, and partially mediate the effect of job dissatisfaction on corruption.

Acknowledgments

I thank Sergio Iban Torres Bravo for granting permission to collect data for this project. I also thank Dr. Brian J. Stults, Dr. Gary Kleck, and the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their valuable input on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Notes

¹ Descriptive statistics in Tables 1 and 2 show very similar data, suggesting that the imputed values show a strong consistency with the original data.

² The imputed data percentages presented in this table are the average percentages of the 10 iterations of imputed data.

³ Pearson’s bivariate correlation level of significance cannot be calculated in imputed data. The author performed a separate Pearson’s bivariate correlation only including the cases with complete responses between the endogenous variable and the exogenous variables (results not shown in this paper). The directions of the relations among the exogenous variables and the endogenous variable were the same as the ones presented in this table. There were no substantial differences in the strength of the correlations between the imputed and non-imputed data. The bivariate correlations between the exogenous variables with the behavior of corruption that were significant at the α.≤05 level were gender, rank in the police, job dissatisfaction, commitment, definitions, and reinforcement. The variables education, age, rank and time in the police were listed as ordinal variables in Table 3 to ease their interpretation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

L. Sergio Garduno

L. Sergio Garduno is a doctoral student in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Louisville. His research interest includes causes of police misconduct, gangs, delinquency, jails and theory testing.