Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing The Evidence (2004) / Chapter Skim
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4 Explaining Police Behavior: People and Situations
4 Explaining Police Behavior: People and Situations
Pages 109-154
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From page 109... ...
Or to consider an example about police fairness, it is one thing to suggest that police who behave in a disrespectful manner toward citizens are perceived as less fair and less legitimate than those who avoid disrespectful behavior. But it is quite another thing to determine what causes police to behave disrespectfully toward some citizens and how to devise ways of preventing disrespectful officer behavior.
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From page 110... ...
The substantial literature involved in this broad range has been divided into four general categories, beginning with the explanatory factors closest to everyday police work, namely, the characteristics of the situations in which officers make decisions, such as whether to make an arrest, use force, or engage in community policing. Such situational characteristics include, for example, the strength of evidence available to an officer about a suspect's guilt, the personal characteristics of the suspect, and the characteristics of the victim.
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From page 111... ...
surveys of police officers. Most of the research on individual officer decision making draws on field observations of police, and much of that can be characterized as systematic social observation (Reiss, 1971; Mastrofski et al., 1998)
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From page 112... ...
, with attention focused particularly on 60 neighborhoods served by those departments. During summer 1977, trained observers accompanied patrol officers on 900 patrol shifts, 15 in each of the 60 neighborhoods.
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From page 113... ...
Because of the rigor of the methodological design and the scale of systematic observation studies, they comprise the strongest data from which to draw conclusions regarding police behavior. Yet observational data are not without shortcomings.
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From page 114... ...
. To the extent that Bittner's is a valid and comprehensive description of police work, it suggests that the greatest part of the variation in police officer behavior will be accounted for by establishing those situational exigencies that most powerfully shape police action.
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From page 115... ...
. The analytic strategy of such research has been to control statistically for the effects of legal factors -- particularly the strength of evidence, the seriousness of the offense, and the preferences and cooperation of complainants -- which are unambiguously legitimate criteria for police decision making and to estimate how much if any of the remaining variation in police behavior is attributable to extralegal factors, such as race.
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From page 116... ...
. Furthermore, the success of a complainant's arrest request was highly sensitive to the strength of evidence available; the likelihood that police officers would fulfill a request for an arrest was found to be much higher in situations in which evidence was strong compared to those in which it was weak.
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From page 117... ...
are most strongly influenced by legal considerations, it is still possible for extralegal influences to exert a significant effect. Indeed the available research shows that police behavior is also influenced by extralegal factors, but, for the most part, findings have not been consistent as to the nature and strength of those effects.
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From page 118... ...
. An analysis of data collected in 1992 showed that the likelihood of arrest was greater when the suspect resisted police authority -- if, for example, they refused to comply with an explicit police command, acted threateningly, or offered physical resistance (Mastrofski et al., 1995)
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From page 119... ...
Second, effects of citizen demeanor may vary according to the particular feature of police behavior under consideration: arrest, use of force, granting citizens requests, and affective displays toward the citizen. 2However, a recent survey of police (Weisburd et al., 2000)
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From page 120... ...
Citizens' Social Class Proposition 3: Some members of the public are concerned that the po lice distribute coercion and assistance based on the citizen's social class. The evidence on the effects of social class on police behavior is scarce and the findings are mixed, precluding a judgment about its effects.
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From page 121... ...
Citizens' Sex Proposition 4: Some are concerned that police officers are biased in favor of or against female suspects and victims. There is mixed evidence concerning whether and how citizen gender influences police behavior; the committee is unable to draw firm conclusions about the existence of widespread bias in police practices linked to gender bias.
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From page 122... ...
Some research has found, in analyzing police responses to incidents of domestic conflict, that the pattern of police decision making follows the same patterns that have been observed in police encounters with suspected offenders generally (Berk and Loseke, 1981; Worden and Pollitz, 1984) , with the implication that police handle domestic conflicts in much the same way that they handle other incidents.
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From page 123... ...
Studies of police behavior have routinely examined the degree to which officers' treatment of citizens varies with their race. Some of the earliest inquiries reported disparities in the treatment of white and black suspects, to the expected disadvantage of the latter, but these disparities were attributed to causal factors other than race itself: to the more frequently disrespectful demeanor of black or other minority suspects (Black, 1971)
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From page 124... ...
, but by doing so, researchers have failed to produce results that are as useful as they might be to courts charged with reviewing police practices for potential racial bias. For example, much of the field research suggests that when other extralegal factors, such as the citizen's demeanor, are taken into account along with the citizen's race, no race effects are found.
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From page 125... ...
. In general, research on police behavior suggests that race effects are highly contingent.
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From page 126... ...
Mental Illness Proposition 6: Police have been accused of arresting mentally disor dered citizens without legal justification. Although some initial studies supported this claim, later studies found that, other things being equal, mentally disordered suspects are no more likely or even less likely than other suspects to be arrested.
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From page 127... ...
The Chicago study used clinical criteria, while the POPN and PSS studies used observers' perceptions, thought to more accurately reflect police officers' perceptions. If observers (or police)
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From page 128... ...
Finally, the small number of mentally disordered suspects available for study in all of the field observations sums to only 133, hardly constituting a basis for a stable estimation of effects. Given the limitations of the available research, the Committee is unable to draw a conclusion about the independent influence of a suspect's mental illness on the police arrest decision.
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From page 129... ...
Relevant research on these general constructs is reviewed below. Authoritarian Personalities Proposition 7: A popular stereotype about police holds that officers embrace attitudes that are more authoritarian than the average person and that these attitudes influence police behavior in undesirable ways.
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From page 130... ...
There is insufficient evidence to establish whether these or any other "cultural" perspectives distinguish police officers from the citizenry generally or from other occupations. There is no rigorous evidence that measures the influence of the police culture on actual police practice.
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From page 131... ...
To the extent that it exists and holds sway, police culture is important because, first, it is thought to represent a major obstacle to holding officers accountable, and second, it is an impediment to organizational change. The culture buffers officers from organizational sanctions and also serves to promulgate views about how police work should be performed.
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From page 132... ...
One study of a department that was trying to imbue a "community policing culture (proactive community building) in its patrol officers in the early 1990s found that the department had achieved modest success in getting its officers to share its vision of community policing, but there was tremendous variation in the styles of patrol that officers exhibited, suggesting that the police culture of that department was more fragmented than the "monoculture" literature would have predicted (Mastrofski et al., 2002b)
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From page 133... ...
To measure a culture's effects, it must exist independent of the outlooks of the individual officers it presumably affects, because we must be able to entertain the possibility that some, perhaps many, officers will not embrace the dominant cultural outlook, even though they may feel its pressure. But it is not clear where researchers should look to measure the police culture.
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From page 134... ...
Job satisfaction is a multidimensional construct: an officer may be satisfied with some elements of her job while she is dissatisfied with other elements. Police officers tend to be satisfied with the intrinsic elements of their jobs: the variety of tasks and the challenge and significance of the work (see, e.g., Zhao et al., 1999)
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From page 135... ...
The proposition that police officers' patterns of behavior correspond to their outlooks is certainly plausible, given the latitude that officers have in performing police work on the street. One might expect that officers' occupational attitudes would manifest themselves especially in the more discretionary forms of behavior, those that are not regulated by law or standard operating procedure, or that are difficult to subject to supervisory oversight or other review.
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From page 136... ...
It is fair to say that some of the research on police attitudes is subject to these methodological limitations. Finally, the whole point of creating police organizations is to attenuate the link between the views of individual officers and how they practice policing.
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From page 137... ...
Reformers have made this a fundamental precept of professionalizing police, although police officers may be more inclined to adhere to the notion that knowledge derived from classroom instruction is of limited value, while learning by doing (or watching one's fellow officers) is how the most valuable knowledge and skills are obtained (Rubinstein, 1973; Van Maanen, 1978; Bayley and Bittner, 1984)
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From page 138... ...
and must therefore be regarded with considerable caution for the purpose of predicting specific types of behavior, such as making an arrest, using force, or engaging in some form of community policing. While many people believe that, other things being equal, more intelligent police officers will perform better, some have postulated that people of both low and high intelligence will not perform policing as competently as those in the middle range (Kenney and Watson, 1990)
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From page 139... ...
There is widespread enthusiasm for college education as a valuable developer of knowledge, skill, and ethics for policing generally and community policing in particular (Shernock, 1992; Baro and Burlingame, 1999; Smith and Flanagan, 2000)
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From page 140... ...
He found that officers with a bachelor's degree were significantly more likely to use reasonable levels of force, but that they were indistinguishable from officers without a college degree in the use of improper force. Data from the POPN study found that college education had no significant effect on the amount of time officers spent on problem solving (DeJong et al., 2001)
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From page 141... ...
To what extent does the trend toward more college education produce a police force with less understanding and empathy for society's disadvantaged persons, and what are the consequences for street-level police practice? The committee finds the available evidence inadequate to make recommendations regarding the desirability of higher education for improving police practice and strongly recommends rigorous research on the effects of higher education on job performance.
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From page 142... ...
It was evaluated using an experimental design that randomly assigned officers to treatment and control groups, taking pre- and post-treatment measures of a wide range of police behaviors, practices, attitudes, and perceptions. This program included not only training (60 hours)
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From page 143... ...
The results of this research are mixed. The amount of training in community policing had no influence on the amount of time officers spent on problem solving (DeJong et al., 2001)
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From page 144... ...
A survey of training for community policing in over 500 police agencies indicated that few police agencies were even going so far as to require that their field training officers have knowledge of community policing (McEwen, 1997)
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From page 145... ...
Another important unresolved issue about training content is determining what sort of curriculum is most effective in promoting the practice of various aspects of community policing. Minimum training standards are established by each state's police officer standards and training council, but there is virtually no rigorous research to guide them on how to structure recruit training curricula most effectively (for example, whether to integrate community policing training seamlessly throughout the curriculum or whether to highlight it in special segments)
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From page 146... ...
· For a given type of training, what kind of on-the-job reinforcement is required to produce the desired change in officer behavior? How important are departmental rewards and sanctions for performing according to training compared with an individual officer's sense that the skills learned in training are useful?
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From page 147... ...
Some recent research shows that female police officers are more inclined to engage in community policing and caregiving behavior, but the pattern is mixed and the number of studies limited. Indeed, the received wisdom from the research community is that whatever influence race and gender may exert on behavior is overwhelmed by the unifying effects of occupational socialization (see Donohue and Levitt, 2001, for a review)
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From page 148... ...
Reformers of American police have for some time couched their criticisms and claims as if the race of the police officer has a significant influence on how the officer behaves (Kerner Commission, 1968:315)
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From page 149... ...
. As with the punitive aspects of police work, little evidence in support of officer race effects has been found when researchers have attempted to predict various forms of order maintenance, police assistance, and engagement in community policing.
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From page 150... ...
It also seems reasonable to hypothesize that when there is substantial racial heterogeneity in a police force, and that force also experiences substantial race-based tensions, officers' race may have an effect on how they practice policing, although the nature of the effects could well differ from situations in which there is racial heterogeneity and no such tension. Although nearly all of the available multivariate research suggests that an officer's race is not a significant influence on police behavior, this issue should be explored more fully by considering different contexts in which the officer's race might matter.
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From page 151... ...
, focusing on the "masculine" or enforcement-oriented aspects of police work. Some of the early empirical work on police behavior suggested that female officers are less aggressive, less inclined to make arrests and citations, and less inclined to misbehave (see Sherman, 1980; Mastrofski, 1990; Riksheim and Chermak, 1993, for reviews)
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From page 152... ...
found no difference between men and women in their proclivity to initiate order maintenance activities on their own. Thus, two of the studies do suggest that female officers are more likely to engage in the caregiving sorts of community building and problem-solving aspects of community policing, while the evidence is less clear on the kinds of behaviors that constitute a projection of the more intrusive and coercive aspects of police authority.
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From page 153... ...
Are extralegal factors, such as revealed in race effects, less likely in departments with more active systems for detecting, correcting, or punishing racially biased officer practices? Despite the considerable effort police leaders have devoted to winning the hearts and minds of police officers, the available evidence is not encouraging about the prospects of changing officer behavior by changing their outlook.
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From page 154... ...
Such evaluations should measure outcomes in terms of actual policing practices rather than tests and other proxies. The absence of effects on police behavior related to the officer's race suggests that it may be irrelevant to actual practice on the street, although it leaves untested the impact of a more racially diverse police workforce on the legitimacy of the police (a topic for Chapter 8)
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