Public servants or soldiers? A test of the police-military equivalency hypothesis

ABSTRACT

During these times of escalating tensions between the police and the communities they serve, the news and social media have been full of images of police officers wearing military gear, armed with military weapons, and driving military vehicles. This study surveyed a sample of undergraduate college students taking criminal justice classes at a Midwestern university and examined whether the blurred lines between police officers and soldiers have caused the public to perceive police officers who work in urban areas as being equivalent to soldiers in war zones. The findings indicate that holding a conservative crime ideology and having negative attitudes towards people who live in poor, high crime neighborhoods (‘the policed’) are strong predictors of a belief in police-military equivalency. Discussions for future research and tests of this theory are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen perceptions of the police
• police militarization
• symbolic racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is worth noting that African Americans are the most dominant minority group in Cincinnati, comprising approximately 44.8% of the population, while Hispanic and Asian Americans comprise 2.8% and 1.8%, respectively.

2. Traditionally, the conservative crime ideology scale has eleven items (Dunaway and Cullen 1991), all of which were included in the survey. Using exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation, we found that nine of the conservative crime ideology items loaded onto one factor and two of them loaded onto a second factor with the four ‘attitudes toward “the policed”’ measures. The nine items that loaded onto the first factor were summed to create the conservative crime ideology scale for this study. The remaining two were omitted from the study because they dealt with attitudes toward people and society instead of support for more punitive criminal justice policies. Removing these two measures from the conservative crime ideology scale did not make any significant changes to the model results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Omeed S. Ilchi

Omeed S. Ilchi is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Westfield State University. He received his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati in 2018. His research interests include perceptions of the police, police accountability, juvenile justice, and life-course criminology. He has previously published work in Criminology & Public Policy and Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology.

James Frank

James Frank received his J.D. from Ohio Northern University and his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in Criminal Justice and Criminology. He is a professor in School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati and the Director of the Center for Criminal Justice Research. His research primarily focuses on understanding the behavior of street-level police officers, officer decision making during interactions with the public and citizen attitudes and perceptions of the police.