Korean Police Officer Attitudes Toward the Use of Force

Abstract

Contemporary police researchers theorize that officer attitudes affect their discretionary choices in everyday work. That research is largely derived from American or other Western samples. The current research examines a sample of 578 South Korean police officers drawn from three police departments in 2008. The key question addressed is whether officer attitudes, such as selectivity and aggressiveness or organization environment, influence attitudes toward use of force as well as self-reported actions that officers would take in situations involving resistant suspects. Overall, the findings from the Korean sample are consistent with Western-derived hypotheses: Officers reporting aggressive attitudes toward law enforcement are more likely to believe that policies are unnecessarily restrictive on officers’ use of force, that peers are likely to use force against suspects, and to be supportive of peers’ use of force against suspects. Additionally, organizational environment also influences several outcomes. This suggests that the study of coercive police power may be amenable to more general theorizing, and policy-makers should not dismiss international research as irrelevant to local issues.