Police Misconduct in Brooklyn, New York

Abstract

Despite the recent rash of social media videos of seemingly outrageous police misconduct, as mentioned earlier, police misconduct is difficult to document. One source of data is the individual police officer or police official. However, not only is it difficult to get information from individual officers or police officials (Collins, 1998) but because of the homogenous nature of police culture, findings from research at the individual level may be mixed, ambiguous and lack variability (Grant & Grant, 1996; McManus, 1969). Though somewhat more reliable than research at the individual level (Kane & White, 2009) research at the organizational level may nonetheless reflect an organizational subculture of policies formed by administrators but executed by individual police officers. For example, some police organizations may have a “siege mentality” of “them versus us” that permits and even encourages violent misconduct by individual police officers to maintain order on the streets (Fyfe & Skolnick, 1993). In such cases research at the organizational level may also be limited by its lack of variability but more importantly may suffer from external validity, in that administrative officials and supervisors in different police organizations may differ in determining what constitutes police misconduct in their particular organization.