Police Integrity in Croatia

Abstract

The Croatian police, a centralized police agency, under the auspices of the Croatian Ministry of the Interior, have had a short but turbulent history. This chapter explores the contours of police integrity among the Croatian police. The chapter relies on the police integrity survey conducted in 2008/2009. The representative stratified sample of 966 police officers evaluated hypothetical scenarios describing various forms of police misconduct. We analyze the results across several measures of police integrity, such as the police officers’ knowledge of official rules, evaluations of police misconduct as serious, views about appropriate and expected discipline, and the code of silence. Our results suggest that most police officers had no problems recognizing described behavior as rule violating. The respondents’ evaluations of misconduct seriousness varied substantially across the scenarios. Although the behaviors described in the questionnaire are violations not only of the administrative rules but also of criminal law, our respondents expected dismissal for only two such cases, and expected milder disciplinary options for the rest. Finally, although the code of silence has weakened since the mid-1990s, our results show that it is still present among the Croatian police.