Police perceptions of prejudice: how police awareness training influences the capacity of police to assess prejudiced motivated crime

ABSTRACT

Prejudice motivated crime (PMC) is defined as crimes motivated by bias, prejudice or hatred towards members of particular groups, communities and individuals. To understand how police awareness training facilitates or constrains the capacity of police officers to appropriately classify and respond to PMC, data were collected from a population of Police Recruits (PRs) and Protective Service Officers (PSOs) (N = 1609) to ascertain their perceptions of PMC pre- and post-PMC awareness training. These were used in a logistic regression model to identify factors explaining whether PRs and PSOs would identify a vignette/scenario as a PMC. We found PRs and PSOs were more likely to correctly identify a PMC scenario than a control scenario, but only 61% as likely to identify an incident as PMC post-PMC awareness training after accounting for other variables. We argue that awareness training programmes need to be more aligned to the specific needs of policing in diverse societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Police
• training
• prejudice
• recruits
• vignettes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Information regarding PMC training programs is lacking in the extant literature, as such a thorough critical review of the different training programs and training evaluations implemented and used by police organisations in response to PMC was not included in this paper.

2. PSOs are part of the transit safety division of the police. PSOs are employed to monitor peak hour train services and have the same operational power as an operational police officer.

3. Exact details of the PMC awareness training could not be included in this paper due to the ethics agreement protecting the police organisation from identification.

4. The PMC awareness training was based on a self-directed learning concept where the participants learnt from a broad range of experiences, stimulated by immediate and real-life policing situations. The learning outcomes of the PMC awareness training program were motivated by the internal incentives of the participants and were problem-centered.

5. All of the police recruits were instructed to complete the surveys before they were allowed to leave the classroom so there are no missing data relating to each of the responses to the scenarios, although 24 cases of demographic information vanished from the final data set when the Wifi connection at the police academy was lost.

6. Although the findings are not directly generalisable (this research can be considered a single ‘case study’ of Australia data), there are lessons to be learnt and implications drawn from these results, which are relevant to police organisations in other countries.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number #LP110100585].