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Policing in the United States is currently undergoing a serious workforce crisis. Drawing on Van Maanen's police socialization theory, we suggest that police recruiting videos provide an opportunity for departments to send clear signals to recruits about their attitudes and values that will improve recruiting. We employ a randomized vignette survey design to test the effectiveness of recruiting videos. Our findings demonstrate that college students indicate a greater willingness to become a police officer when recruiting videos focus on police officers' service to the community. This effect is particularly strong for students who indicate they desire to make a positive change in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite considerable evidence that police legitimacy results in beneficial outcomes like compliance, cooperation, and empowerment, scholars have yet to agree on how to define and operationalize legitimacy. Drawing on Max Weber's facets of legitimacy, we developed and tested a measure of "traditional authority," reflecting the possibility that some people legitimate the police more so based on tradition than normative concerns regarding fairness. Confirmatory factor analysis of survey data from a national sample of 701 US adults revealed that our traditional authority items loaded separately from items commonly used to capture feelings of trust, obligation to obey, and moral alignment. Furthermore, although perceived legitimacy appears to flow from perceptions of procedural and distributive fairness regardless of how it is measured, traditional authority is more strongly associated with empowerment of the police. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and urge researchers to replicate and extend our work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little evidence about "what works" in police training. The good news is that training evaluations are becoming more common. As we build this evidence base, we need to explore the factors that predict whether officers are receptive to the training programs they complete. We advance a theory of officer training motivation and receptivity that provides a useful framework for training evaluation and test it using survey data from a group of officers randomly assigned to a long-term, social interaction training program. The results demonstrate that trainees' internal locus of control was associated with their motivation to train. In turn, training motivation was associated with receptivity to the training (i.e., training satisfaction and perceived skill acquisition). Additionally, officers' evaluations of supervisor organizational justice were positively associated with perceived skill acquisition. We conclude the paper by discussing avenues for future refinement and testing of the theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police departments are consistently challenged to serve their communities by reducing misconduct and being held accountable. In the United States, policing reform is best described as déjà vu or Groundhog Day, with high-profile groups organising every few years to list the same recommendations for improving the police. Additionally, reform suggestions are too often countered by the comment, "we have always done it this way." By stark contrast, through the Fitzgerald Inquiry and the work of scholars such as David Bayley, the Queensland Police Service stands as a model for creating sustainable change in policing. In this paper, we compare the experiences of the Queensland Police Service with attempts at reform in the United States to suggest a path forward for reforming policing in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to provide a theoretical framework for understanding citizens' decisions to complain about the police, this paper suggests that citizen complaints can be viewed as a justice-restoring response and tests six hypotheses using a factorial vignette experiment. The findings indicate that individuals are more likely to complain when they perceive the interaction as procedurally unfair, distributively unfair, and when the outcome is unfavourable. Positive pre-existing attitudes towards the police result in an increased likelihood of engaging in a justice-restoring response. Despite drawing on Tyler's legitimacy theory, these findings differentiate justice-restoring responses from legitimacy by the comparatively greater impact of outcome favourability and the differing direction of the effect of pre-existing attitudes towards the police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policing experts have suggested that shifting from a warrior mindset – officers viewing themselves as warriors fighting crime – to a guardian mindset – officers valuing working with the public to reduce crime – is a valuable method for improving police-community relations across the United States. However, little empirical evidence has been used to inform this debate. To address this gap, we examined survey data from two U.S. police departments to assess the validity of the Warrior/Guardian framework. Factor analyses suggested that the warrior and guardian mindsets are distinct, but related concepts. Furthermore, these mindsets are associated with different attitudinal outcomes (e.g. the guardian mindset was associated with greater prioritization of communication during citizen encounters). Thus, the Warrior/Guardian framework is supported empirically. Overlap between the Warrior/Guardian framework and existing police culture literature is discussed and police culture is offered as a potential explanation for variation in warrior and guardian orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]