An empirical test of the influence of society at large on police integrity in a centralized police system

Abstract

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to test the theory of police integrity, particularly its fourth dimension, on a centralized police agency and to assess the degree to which levels of police integrity are related to the characteristics of the larger environment.Design/methodology/approach– In 2008, a stratified representative sample of 945 Croatian police officers from ten police administrations evaluated 11 hypothetical scenarios describing a range of various forms of police misconduct. The questionnaire measures officer views regarding scenario seriousness, appropriate and expected discipline, and willingness to report the misconduct.Findings– Bivariate analyses show that police officers’ evaluations of seriousness differed across categories of police administrations for more than one-half of the scenarios. Multivariate analyses reveal that, once organizational predictors are entered into the models, community characteristics remain significant predictors of seriousness evaluations for only a few scenarios.Research limitations/implications– The analytical strategies were limited by the number of police administrations in the country.Practical implications– The results indicate that levels of police integrity in large, centralized organizations vary across units and that the characteristics of the communities the police are a contributing factor to these differences. At the same time, organizational characteristics carry substantial weight.Originality/value– Prior studies of police integrity focussed on the organizational aspects (the first three dimensions of the theory); the present paper extends the literature to ascertain the importance of the larger environment and its characteristics for levels of police integrity (the fourth dimension of the police integrity theory).