Individual Officers Research Articles

Making gifts from contracts: symbolic resources and resanctification in officers’ language

Officers of the Irish Defence Forces have studied at civilian university since 1969, with the introduction of a policy referred to as the University Service Academic Complement (USAC) scheme. In attending university through USAC, officers are obliged to sign a contract stipulating that they will repay the full costs of their time at university. This paper draws on a study of 46 retired and serving officers, to analyse how they discussed their career and the military officer’s experience of civilian higher education. While the agreement officers are obliged to sign is a legal contract, interviewees consistently characterised their experience of the USAC scheme in terms that omitted this economic reality of the financial implications of attending higher education. Instead, they favoured terms that almost exclusively excluded such a perspective, and instead made the USAC scheme appear to be a ‘gift’ in Marcel Mauss’s terms. This paper illustrates how and why this is the case, in that the use of ‘gift language’ is a type of ‘resanctification’ of the military profession by individual officers in the face of the threat to cohesion and their symbolic universe. Beyond and at the societal level, resanctification through gift language also implies a political 'double-bind' for officers in terms of their relationship with civilian military authorities and the military organisation itself. This paper concludes with an overview of some of the implications of a gift analysis for militaries and their surrounding societies.

Introduction: Assembling Peacekeeping and Policing in Ghana

By exploring the case of Ghana, this special issue provides two perspectives on UN peacekeeping that until now have been underdeveloped in the literature. First, rather than taking a mission and its host country as the analytical point of departure, the contributions in the special issue focus on how peacekeeping has shaped domestic security in Ghana – a consistent contributor of security personnel to peacekeeping since 1960. Second, instead of focusing on the military component, attention is paid to the link between peacekeeping and law enforcement, and thus how policing – as carried out by the state-sanctioned Ghana Police Service, Ghana Armed Forces and a range of non-state actors – intertwines with and is partially shaped by practices, ideas and discourse that can be traced back to mission deployments. Theoretically, the concept of assemblage is used to frame how peacekeeping stretches across state boundaries and intersects with the politics and practices of domestic security provision. Both at a state institutional level, and in day-to-day policing by individual police officers, order-making practices and discourses are constituted by the assembling of a multitude of logics and historicities that integrate and assimilate as well as contradict and oppose one another. It is how the experience of peacekeeping becomes part of and shapes these ever-evolving assemblages that the contributions to this special issue investigate. Changes may be institutional and macro-political but are as often deeply personal and individualised, with implications for how security personnel perceive and practice their roles.

Assembling Community Policing: Peacekeeping and the Ghana Police Service’s Transformation Agenda

This article shows how peacekeeping experiences manifest in the Ghana Police Service’s (GPS) community policing strategies and practices in often inconspicuous and individualized ways. Peacekeeping constitutes an important element of what the article refers to as the community policing assemblage. However, the article emphasises that the shape of the community policing assemblage is conditioned by a wide range of discourses and practices beyond peacekeeping. Global and national policies and strategies relating to policing, including the GPS’s own transformation agenda, local and individual interpretations and translations of peacekeeping experiences and what community policing means, all play into how the assemblage is formed. Thus, the article disentangles the effects of peacekeeping and puts it in the context of broader policing in Ghana, based on in-depth interviews and observations with police officers, mainly from the GPS’s community policing headquarters in Tesano, Accra. It concludes that while several studies have shown how peacekeeping has shaped Ghana’s security institutions and sense of role in the world, it has not been able to chip away at or counteract the deep and deepening control that security institutions in the country are subjected to by politicians. Arguing that the peacekeeping experience may have a profound transformative effect on individual police officers, yet little if any impact in terms of depoliticising the GPS and policing more broadly, is a less sweeping conclusion. However, suggesting that the effects of peacekeeping often are local and individualized, at times deeply embodied experiences, is also a more accurate conclusion empirically.

The role of the mass media in forming the population's trust to the police

The scientific article is devoted to a topical and interesting topic of research on determining the role of the media in building public confidence in the police.
 The paper proves that the media is the main tool for influencing the opinion of modern man, and accordingly the media play a decisive role in building public confidence in the police. Scientific research of this tool and its competent use will help increase the level of trust of the population of Ukraine in the police.
 Two components of creating a positive image and authority of the National Police of Ukraine are distinguished: the actual work of the police and the media image of the police officer.
 The author classifies the media into the following types: traditional (periodicals: newspapers, magazines, etc.); new (radio and television); the latest (the Internet, which includes electronic versions of printed publications, electronic publications, social networks, blogs, Telegram channels, YouTube channels, etc.).
 It was found that three main functions are involved in the formation of the image of a police officer: informational (placement in the media of relevant information about the results of the National Police, social processes related to police performance of official duties, etc.); communicative (aimed at discussing in the media information about the activities of the National Police, public relations between police and citizens, etc.); ideological (the ability of the media to reflect and shape public opinion of the population as a whole, a particular community and individual social groups about the activities of the National Police).
 It is concluded that the process of creating a media image of a police officer may not be spontaneous, but may be formed as a result of specially developed algorithms for specific actions (strategies, tactics, technologies) in management, marketing, image strategy, and linguistics, including political linguistics. But such technologies are still not fully used by the National Police.
 It is concluded that the media image of the National Police in general and individual police officers in particular is both a tool and an object of management of law enforcement.

A Study on the Effect of Police Officers Organizational Fairness Regulations and Power Distance Tendency on Organizational Effectiveness

Purpose: This study comprehensively identified which of the sub-Factor s of organizational fairness they per-ceived had a positive effect on organizational effectiveness. In addition, this study verified how power distance tendency, an individual characteristic variable, affects the relationship between their job satisfaction, organiza-tional commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior. Method: The scope and method of this study are as follows. First, the time range of the study ran from Decem-ber 1, 2020 until December 30, 2020, and the spatial range of the study was the Daegu Metropolitan Police Agency, 10 police stations affiliated, and 31 patrol divisions within the police station. Second, as for the method of the study, a reference study and an empirical study were concurrently conducted via a questionnaire survey. Results: The results of this study are as follows. First, it was found that the organizational fairness perceived by police officers had a significant positive effect on organizational effectiveness. Second, in the influence of power distance tendency on organizational effectiveness, it was found that the higher the power distance tendency, the more negative effect on job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior. Conclusion: The implications of this study are as follows. First, the establishment of a fair police organizational culture should precede. Second, in order to ensure that individual police officers have an active and positive attitude in enhancing organizational effectiveness, organizational efforts should be made to resolve complaints based on compensation results. Third, it is necessary to solve operational problems by receiving expert diagnoses on the operation of the performance-based pay system of the police organization and to actively collect and reflect the opinions of police officers who are subject to application.

A meta-analysis of police leadership and organizational effectiveness: focusing on the South Korean police

A meta-analysis of police leadership and organizational effectiveness: focusing on the South Korean police

"Whose help is on the way?": The importance of individual police officers in law enforcement outcomes.

Police discretion has large potential consequences for public trust and safety; however, little is known about the extent of this discretion. I show that arrests critically depend on which officer responds to a 911 call; 1 standard deviation increase in officer arrest propensity raises arrest likelihood by 40%. High arrest officers are more likely to be white and have less experience. I find mixed evidence that arrest propensity is related to arrest quality. High arrest officers use force more often and make more low-level arrests, while they also have a higher share of low-level arrests that result in conviction.

Police stops in Germany – between legal rules and informal practices

PurposeThis paper analyzes micro-political strategies that police officers use during police stops, mostly based on their professional or personal life experience. Police stops take place in an asymmetric power relationship. Actions of police officers during a stop are backed by strong legal powers, and citizens typically do not negotiate how the stop should be carried out.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with German patrol officers.FindingsThe authors demonstrate that micro-political strategies relying on the officers' personal experience, rather than on strategies developed by the police agency based on empirical evidence, are highly problematic. Depending upon the acting officer, micro-political strategies can vary considerably according to the individual officer’s experience and attitudes. This leads to a risk of discrimination in police stops and of potential infringements on the citizens’ fundamental rights.Research limitations/implicationsSee the paper’s methodology section on the limitations of the empirical approach.Practical implicationsThe paper suggests improvements for the practice of police stops.Originality/valueThe article provides new empirical insights in the practice of police stops in Germany and situates the findings in a broader international debate on police stops and shortcomings of the legal rules that govern the police stops.

Operation provide: a multi-agency response to increasing police engagement in cases of intimate partner violence during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Because of the lockdown conditions imposed in the United Kingdom to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus, police services responded to the risk of increased domestic abuse and intimate partner violence in a variety of ways. This study evaluates the effectiveness of a multi-agency pilot program put in place to increase the engagement in both the criminal investigation and safeguarding actions of the police and other agencies for victims of intimate partner violence. In this program, independent domestic violence advocates and independent sexual violence advocates work side by side in a police patrol capacity, conducting joint incident response to reports of domestic abuse in an effort to provide enhanced, immediate victim support. The early findings indicate significant overall increases in engagement with criminal prosecutions. The level of engagement of repeat victims in respect of safeguarding and criminal investigations also greatly increased. In addition, individual offences of controlling and coercive behaviour, harassment, threats to kill, affray and malicious communications showed significant rises in engagement. The findings indicate that improved victim support at an earlier stage improves the likelihood of agencies protecting, preventing and reducing cases affecting victims of intimate partner violence. Areas of further research include victim and practitioner perspectives and a more comprehensive data analysis to evaluate if these early findings remain at greater volumes and over time.

How does subnational variation in repression affect attitudes toward police? Evidence from Iraq’s 2019 protests

Recent episodes of severe police repression and violence against protesters around the world have brought new urgency to longstanding calls for police reform and in some cases more fundamental structural changes including abolition of existing police institutions. However, the police are not monolithic and there is considerable subnational variation in the extent to which individual police officers and units use excessive force against civilians, and this variation has important implications for police legitimacy in the eyes of the public. In Iraq, where federal police violently repressed anti-government demonstrations in 2019—killing more than 600 protesters—but local police refrained from violence and in some cases intervened to protect civilians, public opinion became significantly more negative toward federal police but not toward local police. These results suggest that civilians distinguish between the conduct of different actors in a decentralized, fragmented security apparatus and attribute blame individually rather than collectively blaming the state security apparatus as a whole. I suggest that two mechanisms—decentralization and fragmentation of state security institutions—interact to shape the pattern of subnational police violence in Iraq and discuss broader implications for police reform in Iraq and beyond.

Is Police Misconduct Contagious? Non-trivial Null Findings from Dallas, Texas

ObjectivesUnderstanding if police malfeasance might be “contagious” is vital to identifying efficacious paths to police reform. Accordingly, we investigate whether an officer’s propensity to engage in misconduct is associated with her direct, routine interaction with colleagues who have themselves engaged in misbehavior in the past.MethodsRecognizing the importance of analyzing the actual social networks spanning a police force, we use data on collaborative responses to 1,165,136 “911” calls for service by 3475 Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers across 2013 and 2014 to construct daily networks of front-line interaction. And we relate these cooperative networks to reported and formally sanctioned misconduct on the part of the DPD officers during the same time period using repeated-events survival models.ResultsEstimates indicate that the risk of a DPD officer engaging in misconduct is not associated with the disciplined misbehavior of her ad hoc, on-the-scene partners. Rather, a greater risk of misconduct is associated with past misbehavior, officer-specific proneness, the neighborhood context of patrol, and, in some cases, officer race, while departmental tenure is a mitigating factor.ConclusionsOur observational findings—based on data from one large police department in the United States—ultimately suggest that actor-based and ecological explanations of police deviance should not be summarily dismissed in favor of accounts emphasizing negative socialization, where our study design also raises the possibility that results are partly driven by unobserved trait-based variation in the situations that officers find themselves in. All in all, interventions focused on individual officers, including the termination of deviant police, may be fruitful for curtailing police misconduct—where early interventions focused on new offenders may be key to avoiding the escalation of deviance.

The Creation of a Correctional Officer Trainee Self-Efficacy Index: An Application of Item Response Theory

Correctional staff turnover has been linked to burnout in current staff, risk of physical injury due to understaffing, and high replacement costs due to onboarding processes. To date, much research has been devoted to job characteristics and demographic profiles to understand turnover, but little research has examined highly dynamic factors, such as self-efficacy. Given that self-efficacy has been linked to absenteeism, turnover, and engagement across vocational contexts, the current study seeks to provide practitioners and researchers with the tools to examine self-efficacy through the Correctional Officer Trainee Self-Efficacy Index. Comprising each task that correctional officer training academies train in, the self-efficacy index can be used to identify areas improvement in curricula or in individual officer development throughout training. Using the graded response model of item response theory, we examine item-level properties of the index using a sample of 673 pre-service correctional officers across two Midwestern and one Southern state. Results indicated that the self-efficacy indices loaded onto two factors. Each item had high discrimination, and the range of difficulty parameters for the items was wide. Overall, the correctional officer trainee task self-efficacy index is effective for those with low to high self-efficacy for correctional officer tasks.

ЮНКЕРА ОМСКИХ ШКОЛ ПРАПОРЩИКОВ В ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ВОЙНЕ НА ВОСТОКЕ РОССИИ

This publication is an attempt to trace the collective fate of students (cadets) and the commanding staff of the 1st and 2nd Omsk schools for the training of infantry warrant officers in the period from November 1917, that is, from the moment the schools were disbanded in October and November and the anti-Bolshevik uprising 2nd Omsk school of warrant officers on November 1–3, 1917, until mid-1918, when the so-called “Detachment at the 2nd school of warrant officers” was formed in Omsk. The fates of individual officers are traced up to the mid-20s. The methodological concept of publication is a combination of an anthropological approach and a descriptive-narrative method. The source base in relation to the judicial privates and officers of the Omsk schools was made up of the published memoirs of M.M. Basov, materials of the Siberian periodicals of the period under review, the published office documentation of the organs of the OGPU of the Ukrainian SSR. Regarding the Detachment at the 2nd (Omsk) school of ensigns, new data was found in unpublished sources stored in the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), in particular, fund no. 39498 “Office of the 2nd separate steppe Siberian corps” and fund no. 39617 “Headquarters of the Siberian army”. As a result of the study, it was possible to establish that a significant part of the students (cadets), graduates (warrant officers) and individual officers of Omsk schools by the beginning of the full-scale Civil War in Siberia in June 1918 were on the territory of Western Siberia, in particular, in Omsk. They formed the “core” of the so-called “Detachment at the 2nd school of ensigns”, on the basis of which the 3rd Steppe Siberian Rifle Regiment was formed in June 1918, which was later renamed the 15th Kurgan Siberian Rifle Regiment. Some participants in the events of November 1–3, 1917 in Omsk were subjected to investigation and trial in May 1918. In the conclusion, it is emphasized that for Omsk, the formation of the summer of 1918, the 2nd Omsk school for training infantry warrant officers became one of the army symbols of the anti-Bolshevik struggle. The publication is addressed to a wide range of readers, including specialists in the history of the Russian (imperial) army, the First World War and the Civil War, the white movement, and local historians.

Using Network Analytics to Improve Targeted Disruption of Police Misconduct

Research into police misconduct traditionally considers the correlates and antecedents of misconduct among individual officers, as a means of disruption or prevention. However, more recently, deviance among police has been considered through network perspectives. This study considered 7755 allegations of misconduct accrued by 1495 officers from the Baltimore Police Department between January 2015 to January 2020. A social network analysis was employed to consider the characteristics and differences of misconduct networks between assignments and to identify key officers within these networks. Findings suggested that the misconduct networks of patrol assignments functioned marginally different to investigations or specialist duties. Discrete communities of misconduct were identified within each assignment, including a small number of officers that were particularly important to supporting these networks. This study holds practical implications for the identification and disruption of misconduct networks among law enforcement agencies.

Exploring the police use of force continuum with a partial proportional odds model

PurposeThe present study examines a range of police force on the continuum (firearms, TASER/chemical spray and physical force) to see whether they are associated with individual (subject and officer), situational and/or neighborhood factors.Design/methodology/approachA partial proportional odds model is used to analyze police use of force data from 2003 to 2016 in Dallas. Independent variables are allowed for varying effects across the different cumulative dichotomizations of the dependent variable (firearms vs TASER/chemical spray and physical force and firearms and TASER/chemical spray vs physical force).FindingsMost officer demographic and situational factors are consistently significant across the cumulative dichotomizations of police force. In addition, suspect race/ethnicity (Hispanic) and violent crime rates play significant roles when officers make decisions to use firearms, as opposed to TASER/chemical spray and physical force. Overall, situational variables (subject gun possession and contact types) play greater roles than other variables in affecting police use of force.Originality/valueDespite the large body of police use of force research, little to no research has used the partial proportional odds model to examine the ordinal nature of police force from physical to intermediate to deadly force. The current findings can provide important implications for policy and research.

Indonesian Female Police Officer’s Deployment as International Police Officers in United Nations – African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) (2016-2018)

The main purpose is to analyze the role of Indonesian female police deployed as Individual Police Officers in the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Darfur from 2016 to 2018. This research was designed as a qualitative case study that triangulated data from previously published researches, institutional documents, and semi-structured qualitative interviews. Previous scholarly publications were used to observe gender deficit – which is the lack of female personnel in UN peacekeeping missions. Institutional documents, particularly ex-Indonesian female police reports, were analyzed to contribute to data enrichment in this research. Lastly, the authors conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with some ex-female police who have completed their deployment in UNAMID (2016-2018). Concerning the gender equality and counterinsurgency concepts, this research figured out that Indonesian female police could demonstrate their strategic role to provide skill-building activities, trust-building with refugees, and human rights advocacy. The numbers of Indonesian female police in this mission remained higher than other Southeast Asian contributing countries, but the Indonesian female police were also functional in line with the UN gendering peace and security agenda.

Theorising the police support volunteer experience in an English constabulary: A role identity perspective

ABSTRACT Police Support Volunteers (PSVs) – citizens who give their time freely to perform tasks that complement the duties of police officers and staff – are a relatively new addition to a long and established history of volunteers in policing. However, despite featuring in every police service in England and Wales, little is known about the individuals who volunteer or their experiences while doing so. This article draws on interviews with 20 PSVs and five volunteer managers in a large urban police service in England. Findings point to the importance of volunteers being recognised and valued for their contribution, the ways in which this is communicated by paid members of the workforce, and the meaning that PSVs attach to feeling recognised and valued in terms of their satisfaction and intention to continue to give their time. The article frames the significance of PSV experiences through role identity theory – the aspects of an individual’s self-image that they derive from the social categories to which they perceive themselves belonging – which has been shown to be influential on the development of organisational commitment, volunteer satisfaction, and the subsequent sustained volunteering behaviour that this can bring about. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of embedding volunteer recognition throughout the police organisation, rather than relying on the tenacity of individual officers and staff members. It also acknowledges the opportunities that a role identity perspective brings to a currently under-theorised field, helping to make sense of PSVs’ experiences as a volunteer in policing.

The Economics of Policing and Public Safety

The efficiency of any police action depends on the relative magnitude of its crime-reducing benefits and legitimacy costs. Policing strategies that are socially efficient at the city level may be harmful at the local level, because the distribution of direct costs and benefits of police actions that reduce victimization is not the same as the distribution of indirect benefits of feeling safe. In the United States, the local misallocation of police resources is disproportionately borne by Black and Hispanic individuals. Despite the complexity of this particular problem, the incentives facing both police departments and police officers tend to be structured as if the goals of policing were simple—to reduce crime by as much as possible. Formal data collection on the crime reducing-benefits of policing, and not the legitimacy costs, produce s further incentives to provide more engagement than may be efficient in any specific encounter, at both the officer and departmental level. There is currently little evidence as to what screening, training, or monitoring strategies are most effective at encouraging individual officers to balance the crime reducing benefits and legitimacy costs of their actions.

Cops and COVID: an examination of California officers' perceptions and experiences while policing during a pandemic

PurposeUsing online survey data from a sample of 440 police officers in California throughout May 2020, the current study collected time-sensitive information on officers' perceptions and departmental experiences in the wake of the pandemic. It examined officers' perceptions of agency responsivity as well as their perceptions of morale, stress and risk following agency responses and changes in policy patterns, service delivery innovations and other administrative challenges.Design/methodology/approachCOVID-19 had a tremendous impact on the law enforcement community, who continued to work and adapt in order to provide public safety. During the first few months of the pandemic, a number of national data collection efforts set out to understand what police agencies, at the organizational-level, were doing to address the crisis. Largely missing from these initial discussions were the perspectives of individual officers, particularly how they felt about their respective departments ensuring safety and balancing risk.FindingsResults from ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions found that the number of departmental changes made in the wake of COVID-19 that reduced police–public contact was associated with (1) increased levels of perceived agency responsivity to officer needs (i.e. balancing officer safety, taking active steps to maintain officers' mental health) and (2) reduced levels of perceived negative outlook (e.g. stress, low morale, danger/risk). Policy implications and the importance of police executives' decisions during crisis are discussed.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to examine perceptions of policing during the pandemic from an individual officer point of view rather than an organizational standpoint.

“Everyone Needs to Be Cared For”: Exploring Care from the Perspective of Prison Officers Working with Young Adult Offenders

ABSTRACT The purpose of the current study was to explore the care related experiences of prison officers working on an Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) Pathway service, located within a prison for young adults. Due to the exploratory nature of the study, a qualitative, grounded theory approach was utilized. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve officers. The data were analyzed in accordance with constructionist grounded theory methodology. The results identified the core category of relationships and two additional categories: impact of caring and development of officers’ caring approach. These categories were integrated into a model of care. Officers reported caring to be both rewarding and challenging. They expressed beliefs that providing care to service users increases wellbeing and reduces recidivism. The results demonstrate a reciprocal nature to care, with officers needing to receive care themselves in order to care effectively for service users. Officers’ approach to caring for service users was dependent upon an interaction between their own experiences of care, care related values, their relationship with individual service users and their own emotional state. Individual officers and the OPD Pathway service could benefit from additional support and understanding from the prison system.