Traditional Police Culture, Use of Force, and Procedural Justice: Investigating Individual, Organizational, and Contextual Factors

Abstract

Traditional police culture (TPC) is a set of attitudes and values, developed as coping mechanisms for police work’s unique and inherent strains, that fosters distrust toward, and isolation from, citizens. An online survey of 781 American police officers from 48 U.S. states is used to assess: first, the individual, organizational, and contextual correlates of endorsement of TPC, and second, whether endorsement of TPC relates to support for the use of force and support for procedurally just tactics. Results indicate that, apart from supervisor status and supervisor race, individual-level officer characteristics are not related to endorsement of TPC. By contrast, organizational factors—agency size and type—relate to endorsement of TPC among line officers, but not supervisors. Results also indicate that support for use of force and support for procedural justice are strongly linked to TPC endorsement among both line officers and managers.

Keywords:

• police
• law enforcement
• attitudes
• use of force
• procedural justice

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We thank Justin T. Pickett for his comments on, and critiques of, earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ The NCJTC, located at Fox Valley Technical College in Wisconsin. Officer.com, owned by Cygnus Law Enforcement Group, is one the Internet’s most popular law enforcement community groups. Further information about these organizations and our cooperative agreements with them is available upon request.

² To ensure that contact with one of the co-authors did not bias our results, we also ran all models with respondents from this portion of the snowball sample (N = 34) excluded. The results are substantively similar.

³ Given that the three misconduct-related items loaded strongly on the factor, we also conducted ancillary analysis using a Permissiveness toward Misconduct subscale (α = .726) based on these three items. The results are substantively similar to the main findings.

⁴ We also run the analyses with the item excluded. Again, the results are substantively similar to the main findings.

⁵ Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jason R. Silver

Jason R. Silver is a PhD candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany—SUNY. Her research interests include police–citizen relations, moral psychology, and public opinion on crime and justice.

Sean Patrick Roche

Sean Patrick Roche is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. His research interests include policing, offender decision-making, social technologies, and public opinion on crime and justice.

Thomas J. Bilach

Thomas J. Bilach is a graduate student in the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University. His research interests focus on policing, public policy, and organizational justice. He is also a police officer in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) at the Office of Management Analysis and Planning (OMAP), where he drafts department policy and conducts program evaluation.

Stephanie Bontrager Ryon

Stephanie Bontrager Ryon is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her scholarly research focuses on effective interventions for adult and juvenile offenders, sex trafficking, demand for illegal commercial sex, and sentencing disparities for disadvantaged populations.