Development and testing of methods for identifying police officers prone to illegitimate violence

Abstract

All police officers go through the process of professional selection and must be recommended by psychologists for service. However, information about aggressive and violent behaviour and other illegal actions of police officers regularly appears in the media. For this purpose, we have developed a questionnaire for identifying aggressive and violent tendencies of police officers. As a basis for the proposed research methodology, the psycho-dynamically oriented personality questionnaire (POPQ) "Resource" was used, based on the self-structural test of Günter Ammon. Aggression within the framework of this methodological approach is understood from the point of view of the subject's active attitude to the surrounding world rather than from the point of view of causing harm or damage to living organisms. The author's methodology was created in several stages – selection of statements to which the polar groups of employees responded reliably (p < 0.05), assessment of the discriminative ability of these statements and their internal consistency, calculation of the main psychometric characteristics, testing of the scale on an independent sample of police officers. The results of evaluating the validity and reliability of the questionnaire scale are presented in the study. The diagnostic tools are aimed at identifying the latent propensity of a police officer to illegitimate violence.