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This paper explores the respondents’ views of the police in Croatia and the USA. In 2017, we surveyed a sample of the Croatian emigrants residing in the United States and invited them to fill out a questionnaire containing six hypothetical vignettes describing examples of police corruption. The respondents were asked to evaluate the seriousness of police corruption and estimate how serious police officers in both countries would evaluate these same behaviors. The results show that, in the majority of the scenarios, the respondents evaluated examples of police corruption more seriously in the United States than in Croatia. Similarly, the findings suggest that the respondents perceived that the Croatian police officers would evaluate police corruption less seriously than their U.S. counterparts. Their migrant status was not related to their perceptions of police officers’ evaluations of seriousness.

This book brings together research on police integrity on regions worldwide. The results for each country indicate whether police officers know the official rules, how seriously they view police misconduct, what they think the appropriate and expected discipline for misconduct should be, and how willing they are to report it. Police misconduct refers to everything from corruption and use excessive force, to perjury, falsification of evidence, and failure to react. Police Integrity and police misconduct are topics of great concern worldwide. Police integrity is envisioned as the inclination to resist temptations to abuse the rights and privileges of police occupation. Using their extensive experience studying police integrity in the United States, the editors have created an applicable framework for measuring police integrity in other countries. The results of their research are brought together in this timely volume, including contributions from both established democracies and countries in transition, which each present unique challenges for improving police integrity. Each chapter follows the same format and contains a theoretical analysis of the relevant legal, historical, political, social, and economic conditions in the country, followed by the analyses of empirical results and policy recommendations. In the last chapter, editors Kutnjak Ivković and Haberfeld take a comparative look across the countries by engaging in the in-depth comparative analysis. This work will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers studying policing both in the United States and internationally, presenting a theoretical framework that can be applied to other regions for further research.