Impact of Postsecondary Education on Police Officers’ Selective Law Enforcement Attitudes: Does the Choice of Academic Major Matter?

Abstract

With the increasing challenges in policing, selective law enforcement, a flexible policing strategy, is widely considered an effective way of maintaining law and order. Officers with favorable attitudes towards selective enforcement commonly use discretion to prioritize responses based on the seriousness of offenders and offenses and to balance their roles of law enforcement, service calls, and maintenance of order. However, as the calls for police officers to pursue higher education continue to gain momentum, it is not known whether college experience, particularly the choice of academic major, influences police officer attitudes toward selective enforcement. Using qualitative data from regular police officers in Murang’a County, a peri-urban county in Kenya, we sought to determine the influence of college academic majors on police officers’ selective law enforcement attitudes. We relied on socialization theory and used a descriptive cross-sectional design. The sample size was 95 police officers with postsecondary experience, selected randomly. We collected data using self-administered structured questionnaires and conducted inferential analysis using SPSS version 22. We established that officers’ academic major has no statistically significant relationship with their selective law enforcement attitudes. We concluded that there is little evidence that what a police officer studies in college affects their role orientation. The study recommends that encouraging police officers to pursue higher education in general will increase their attitudes towards selective law enforcement. Limitations and suggestions for future studies have been discussed.