Police Officers as Warriors or Guardians: Empirical Reality or Intriguing Rhetoric?

Abstract

Policing experts have suggested that shifting from a warrior mindset – officers viewing themselves as warriors fighting crime – to a guardian mindset – officers valuing working with the public to reduce crime – is a valuable method for improving police-community relations across the United States. However, little empirical evidence has been used to inform this debate. To address this gap, we examined survey data from two U.S. police departments to assess the validity of the Warrior/Guardian framework. Factor analyses suggested that the warrior and guardian mindsets are distinct, but related concepts. Furthermore, these mindsets are associated with different attitudinal outcomes (e.g. the guardian mindset was associated with greater prioritization of communication during citizen encounters). Thus, the Warrior/Guardian framework is supported empirically. Overlap between the Warrior/Guardian framework and existing police culture literature is discussed and police culture is offered as a potential explanation for variation in warrior and guardian orientations.

Keywords:

• Policing
• police culture
• use of force
• warrior
• guardian

Appendix A: Priority vignette

While on patrol, you receive a call regarding a suspicious person in the parking lot of a busy strip mall. You have little information and do not know whether the subject has a weapon, but arrive at the scene and make contact with a male who fits the description you were given. He appears to be angry, is being loud, using profanity, and occasionally breaks eye contact and looks around the shopping area. The subject continues to slowly walk backwards away from you despite your order to stop.

Notes

1 It should be noted that academic arguments have acknowledged that it may be possible to be both a warrior and a guardian (Stoughton, 2016b). Still, it is an empirical possibility (and true to the original arguments on the subject) for the concepts to be the opposite end of a single construct.

2 The theoretical distinction between constructs focused on how officers attempted to achieve their goals. Both warriors and guardians are hypothesized to value increased public safety and reduced crime, however, warrior items focused on crime fighting and enforcing the law, while guardian items focused on community relations. Furthermore, the use of exploratory factor analysis as a first step ensured that if the items grouped together as expected by the Warrior/Guardian framework, it was due to these commonalities in the foci of the items and not due to the imposition of our own pre-conceived theoretical factor structure.

3 Both experience and age were initially included in the analysis, however, as would be expected, they were highly correlated with one another. To avoid multicollinearity issues, one of these variables needed to be dropped. The age variable was dropped because experience is more relevant to the theoretical argument that more time on the job will be associated with differences in officers’ orientations toward police work.

4 Typically, ordered categorical variables are considered acceptable for independent variables in a regression analysis as violations of equal spacing will have minimal impact on results (Pasta, 2009). However, as a follow-up, the ordered variables were split into dummy variables at the point where the biggest differences were expected: for experience, 0 = less than 5 years of experience, 1 = 5 years or more of experience, and for education, 0 = no college, 1 = any college credits. With the new dummy variables substituted in the equation, substantively similar results were obtained, confirming Pasta’s (2009) arguments.

5 All multi-factor solutions were run using the oblique “promax” rotation. This approach allowed the factors to be correlated. All factor correlations are noted below.

6 As noted above, responses to these items ranged from 1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree.

7 Items demonstrated univariate normality, however, the assumptions of maximum likelihood rest on multivariate normality. Furthermore, to the extent that the data is, in fact, normally distributed, the mean-adjustment will collapse down to the standard DWLS model.

8 Per the requests from anonymous reviewers, we examined potential differences in the warrior and guardian mindsets by research site where the data was collected. No significant differences were found, however, we would caution against inferring too much from this statistic as there are no control variables included in the analysis. Furthermore, police culture research has previously found that culture often operates below the agency level, such as an officer’s patrol shift (e.g., Ingram, Paoline, & Terrill, 2013; Ingram, Terrill, & Paoline, 2018; Klinger, 1997).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Institute of Justice under Grant 2016-IJ-CX-0018. Points of view and opinions provided are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the US Department of Justice.

Notes on contributors

Kyle McLean

Kyle McLean is an Assistant Professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. He recently completed his PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. His research interests are in policing, criminological theory, and social psychology.

Scott E. Wolfe

Scott E. Wolfe is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. His research focuses on policing, organizational justice, legitimacy, and criminological theory.

Jeff Rojek

Jeff Rojek is the Director of the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso and an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice. His research largely focuses on police organizations, officer behavior, officer safety, and training. He is also a former police officer.

Geoffrey P. Alpert

Geoffrey P. Alpert is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and Griffith University. His research focuses on high-risk police activities. He is a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Research Advisory Committee and is a Federal Monitor for the New Orleans Police Department.

Michael R. Smith

Michael R. Smith is professor and chair of the Department of Criminal Justice at The University of Texas at San Antonio. He conducts research at the intersection of policing, public policy, and the law.