Badges and Bongs: Police Officers’ Attitudes Toward Drugs

Cody Jorgensen

doi:10.1177/2158244018805357

Abstract

For unknown reasons, the research investigating police officers’ attitudes toward drug use is underdeveloped. One study, by Wilson, Cullen, Latessa, and Wills, has directly investigated police officers’ perceptions toward general vice crimes (including drug use) and perceived appropriate sanctions for committing these offenses. This article built upon that study. A survey measuring officers’ attitudes toward drugs was developed and used to gather data from a large metropolitan police department in the South. Responding officers displayed fairly serious and punitive attitudes toward drug offenses. In addition, they reported an interventionist attitude, believing that more can and should be done to control drug activity. Individual officer characteristics, such as education attainment and political ideology, were more strongly associated with drug attitudes than law enforcement indicators, such as rank and experience with the vice/narcotics unit.

Highlights

The criminal law is supposed to express societal values and provide boundaries of acceptable conduct (Walker, 2008)
Descriptive and summary statistics regarding respondent demographics and experience as a law enforcement officer are presented in Table 1 below
The results of an ordinary least squares (OLS) model predicting drug seriousness attitudes are presented in Table 4 below

Summary

Introduction

The criminal law is supposed to express societal values and provide boundaries of acceptable conduct (Walker, 2008). Acts such as murder, rape, robbery, assault, and theft of or damage to property are perceived to negatively affect society and are worthy of prohibition and sanctions. Property and violent crimes are met with sanctions because their underlying behaviors involve both an offender and a victim. In these cases, someone is being subjected to unwanted and harmful force (i.e., violence) or fraud (i.e., theft) at the hands of an offender

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion