The Contours Of Police Integrity

Presenting a comprehensive overview of the potential for police misconduct worldwide, leading criminal justice scholars have compiled survey and case data from 10 countries chronicling police integrity and misconduct.

This work provides an innovative new look at police ethics, including results from an updated version of the classic Police Integrity Questionnaire, including new social and technological advances. It aims to push the study of police research further, expanding on and testing police integrity theory and methodology, the relationship between community and integrity, and the influence of multiculturalism and globalization on policing and community attitudes. This work brings together experienced scholars who have used the police integrity theory and the accompanying methodology to measure police integrity in eleven countries, and provide advance and sophisticated explorations of the topic. Organized into three thematic sections, it explores the testing methodology for international comparisons, insights into police-community relations, and explores police subcultures. This innovative book will be of interest to researchers in criminology & criminal justice, particularly with an interest in policing, as well as related fields such as sociology, public policy, and comparative law.

Presenting a comprehensive overview of the potential for police misconduct worldwide, leading criminal justice scholars have compiled survey and case data from 10 countries chronicling police integrity and misconduct.

This book brings together research on police integrity on regions worldwide. The results for each country indicate whether police officers know the official rules, how seriously they view police misconduct, what they think the appropriate and expected discipline for misconduct should be, and how willing they are to report it. Police misconduct refers to everything from corruption and use excessive force, to perjury, falsification of evidence, and failure to react. Police Integrity and police misconduct are topics of great concern worldwide. Police integrity is envisioned as the inclination to resist temptations to abuse the rights and privileges of police occupation. Using their extensive experience studying police integrity in the United States, the editors have created an applicable framework for measuring police integrity in other countries. The results of their research are brought together in this timely volume, including contributions from both established democracies and countries in transition, which each present unique challenges for improving police integrity. Each chapter follows the same format and contains a theoretical analysis of the relevant legal, historical, political, social, and economic conditions in the country, followed by the analyses of empirical results and policy recommendations. In the last chapter, editors Kutnjak Ivković and Haberfeld take a comparative look across the countries by engaging in the in-depth comparative analysis. This work will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers studying policing both in the United States and internationally, presenting a theoretical framework that can be applied to other regions for further research.

Policing in South Africa has gained notoriety through its extensive history of oppressive law enforcement. In 1994, as the country’s apartheid system was replaced with a democratic order, the new government faced the significant challenge of transforming the South African police force into a democratic police agency—the South African Police Service (SAPS)—that would provide unbiased policing to all the country’s people. More than two decades since the initiation of the reforms, it appears that the SAPS has rapidly developed a reputation as a police agency beset by challenges to its integrity. This book offers a unique perspective by providing in-depth analyses of police integrity in South Africa. It is a case study that systematically and empirically explores the contours of police integrity in a young democracy. Using the organizational theory of police integrity, the book analyzes the complex set of historical, legal, political, social, and economic circumstances shaping police integrity. A discussion of the theoretical framework is accompanied by the results of a nationwide survey of nearly 900 SAPS officers, probing their familiarity with official rules, their expectations of discipline within the SAPS, and their willingness to report misconduct. The book also examines the influence of the respondents’ race, gender, and supervisory status on police integrity. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, policing, sociology, political science, as well as to police administrators interested in expanding their knowledge about police integrity and enhancing it in their organizations.

This book explores the contours of the code of silence and provides policy recommendations geared toward creating an environment less conducive for police misconduct. It responds to the recent calls for police reform, in the wake of the perceived illegitimacy of police actions and the protection that the code of silence seems to provide to the police officers who violate the official rules.Using a case study of a medium-sized U.S. police agency, this book employs the lens of police integrity theory to provide empirically grounded explanations of the code of silence. It examines the potential effects of organizational factors and the attitudes of individual police officers on their willingness to adhere to the code of silence in cases of police corruption, the use of excessive force, interpersonal deviance, and organizational deviance. The book focuses on the following factors that could influence the police code of silence in the times of change: The impact of organizational rule dissemination, discipline, and disciplinary fairness on the scope of the code of silence The role organizational justice plays in shaping police officer willingness to report misconduct The effect that police officers’ self-legitimacy has on their decisions to adhere to the code The influence of peer culture on individual police officer amenability to maintain the code The relationship between officers’ views of themselves, the organization, and the community on their willingness to report misconduct .