Too right-wing for police integrity? General socio-political attitudes connect work experiences to police integrity

ABSTRACT

Police integrity is a crucial steppingstone in police administrators’ long-term goals of obtaining legitimacy and yielding citizens’ evaluations of the police as a legitimate institution. This paper investigates the relationship between work-related experiences and police integrity, as well as the degree to which this relationship is mediated by well-known socio-political attitudes such as authoritarianism, ethnic prejudice, and social dominance orientation. Using structural equation modelling of the responses provided by 1,255 members of the Belgium police, the work-related characteristics, socio-political attitudes, and organisational dimensions of police integrity are related to three outcomes of police integrity. Results show that police officers in the field and those who had more frequent contacts with victims and perpetrators of crimes evaluate misconduct to be less serious, are less willing to say that they would report the behaviour, and advocate less severe disciplinary sanctions. Generalised socio-political attitudes related to prejudice mediate work-related experiences and perceptions of peer police integrity and are in turn negatively related to police integrity outcomes. These findings illustrate that police officers do not operate in a social vacuum as these general socio-political attitudes are non-occupation specific. This suggests that police integrity training programmes not only need to target work-related characteristics, such as an open culture to discuss problems, but also need to target general socio-political attitudes to foster police integrity.

KEYWORDS:

• Police integrity
• peers
• police culture
• structural equation modelling
• survey research
• social values
• political values
• work experiences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Koninklijk Besluit van 10 mei 2006 houdende vaststelling van de deontologische code van de politiediensten, B.S. 30 mei 2006, 27086-27109.

2 For an overview of descriptives (frequency, mean, standard deviation) of dependent and independent variables and item scales see https://osf.io/89cf6/?view_only=a799e63edee941b0b5bb3a2e2e33146d.

3 For example, gender is shown only in Figures 2 and 4, but not in Figure 3, because it was not statistically significant for appropriate discipline.

4 The perceived seriousness has also been analyzed for each type of misconduct separately (results available upon request). The same patterns and mechanisms were visible in each case of misconduct (not in figures). Therefore, we presented the analyses of the total seriousness score across the three types of police misconduct in Figure 2 instead of presenting three separate figures for each misconduct type. The same rationale was followed in Figures 3 and 4 for appropriate discipline and willingness to report.