Examining the relationship between the unique work experiences and cultural orientations of police officers

ABSTRACT

The current study builds upon limited prior research that has assessed the relationship between elements of police culture and a host of unique officer work experiences (e.g. tenure, assigned shift and area, the number of shifts and areas worked, supervisory experience, specialized unit assignment). The sample consists of survey data from over 700 officers from a large police department in the western United States. The results demonstrated that while officers’ assigned shift and area had little effect, a number of other experiences were influential. Officers who had worked a greater number of shifts in their career were more likely to view policing as dangerous; and patrol officers were more likely to view management negatively. Further, specialized unit officers were less likely to view citizens negatively and less oriented toward order-maintenance or community policing than their patrol counterparts. Importantly, experience as measured simply by the number of years on the job, as opposed to other unique work experiences, showed that more senior officers were less likely to view citizens negatively and believe crime fighting should be a top priority, but more likely to view top management through a negative lens. We conclude by reviewing several implications and directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Police culture
• officer experience
• attitudes
• tenure

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1. In the current study we were not able to capture ‘change’ per se as we did not have prior measures of officer attitudes from earlier in their career. However, we sought to capture proximate experiences (i.e. officers’ current shift, crime area, and duty assignment) and distant experiences (i.e. number of shifts and crime areas officers worked over the course of their career, and if they worked in prior duty assignments) in the subsequent analyses. Though not perfect, the study is the first to examine both within the same models.

2. While incorporating the input offered by the working group, researchers were also given the chance to gain legitimacy within the department, which proved to be essential throughout the surveying phase of the study, and we suspect contributed to the high response rate.

3. Similar to Ingram et al. (2018, p. 786), we recognize that each of the five attitudes included here are not comprehensive of police culture in general. Rather, each of these measures was chosen to highlight different dimensions of police culture (i.e. views of occupational danger, citizens, upper management, and role orientation) and their potential relationship with officer experience.

4. It is worth noting prior studies have used these same items to measure order-maintenance and community policing role orientations as separate constructs (Paoline, 2004; Paoline et al., 2015; Terrill & Paoline, 2015). More specifically, dealing with public nuisances and disputes between neighbors have been a part of order-maintenance measures, while having to do something about nuisance businesses and parents who do not control their kids were used for community policing variables. However, when conducting exploratory factor analysis with items from both traditional measures, it was found that these four items loaded onto the same dimension. This also falls in line with the findings from a factor analysis used by Ingram et al. (2013) when assessing these same items. Ultimately, a coding decision was made to combine these items into a single order-maintenance/community policing orientation measure.

5. We also asked officers to provide the length of time they had spent working in specific assignments (i.e. shift and area), but unfortunately there was too much missing data on these items to include for analysis. Additionally, to create the crime area variables, we began by coding reported index crimes in each of the department’s precincts for the two years prior to data collection (2018–2019). From there, ArcGIS software was used to overlay the map of the precincts onto a population Shape file from the U.S. Census Bureau. Next, precincts were ranked based on their respective crime rates with high-crime the top 30%, medium-crime the middle 40%, and low-crime the bottom 30%. Finally, note that regardless of whether it was property, violent, or overall index crimes, the rankings of the precincts remained relatively stable.

6. All models were estimated in SPSS Version 26, Additionally, we estimated ordinal regression models, which produced similar findings across the five models in relation to direction and statistical significance. Further, note that the small N changes across the models is simply the result of listwise deletion.

7. Note that we also created and assessed a variable that merged the total number of shifts and crime areas that officers worked. The results mirrored what was found when shifts and crime areas were assessed separately. That is, the combined measure was significant in the danger model in Table 2 as well as the danger and top management models in Table 3. Hence, we chose to stick with the separate shift and area variables given greater clarity that the number of shifts, not areas, officers had worked were related to the dependent variables.

8. Note as well that the measure used in the present study was based on official reported crime and breaking into high, medium, and low based on percentile. Future researchers may wish to examine what officers consider high, medium, and low crime areas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Logan J. Somers

Logan J. Somers is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia Southern University. His research focuses largely on emerging issues within policing such as officer work experience, police use of force, police culture, and evidence-based policing. His other recent work can be seen in Police Quarterly, Criminal Justice and Policy Review, Policing and Society, and Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management.

William Terrill

William Terrill is an Associate Dean in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, and a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, at Arizona State University. His research centers on police attitudes and behavior with an emphasis on use of force and culture.