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This paper explores public views about police integrity and contrasts them with the police views about police integrity. It also compares citizen and police officer views about the police. A modified version of the police integrity survey, containing 14 hypothetical vignettes describing various forms of police misconduct, was distributed to both students and police officers in Croatia. The respondents in the study, 1,142 police officers from Croatia and 450 students from the University of Zagreb, shared their views of how serious most police officers would evaluate misconduct, the expected discipline, and whether they would report the described misconduct. The results suggest not only that students expressed less positive views of the police than police officers themselves did, but also that students expressed attitudes associated with somewhat lower integrity than police officers did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the factors affecting police officer willingness to adhere to a code of silence among the police in Croatia and Serbia. The paper explores the factors predicting police codes of silence in two countries formed after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s that pursued separate development paths. A police integrity questionnaire recorded the views of 1,007 police officers in Croatia and 1,843 police officers in Serbia. Multivariate modelling was used to analyse the predictors of officers' perceptions of whether they would report the violation in different scenarios. Decades since the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the results indicate that many of the factors predicting the code of silence remain similar across police officers in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains an in-depth exploration of the relation between police code of silence and police assignment. A police integrity survey was used to measure the contours of the code among Croatian patrol officers, detectives, and community-policing officers. Samples of police officers evaluated fourteen hypothetical scenarios describing various forms of police misconduct. Whereas the type of assignment was a weak predictor of the respondents' adherence to the code of silence, the respondents' assessments of misconduct seriousness and expected discipline, as well as perceptions whether other officers would report misconduct, were strong predictors of the respondents' own expressed adherence to the code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores variations in police integrity between police agencies within a centralized police system. The respondents surveyed in this study are 460 Armenian police officers assigned to work in two large police departments, Yerevan and Lori. Yerevan is the Armenian capital and Lori serves the Lori Region, one of the rural parts of the country. The respondents evaluated 11 hypothetical scenarios describing cases of police misconduct. We found relatively few differences between the police officers serving the capital and police officers assigned to a rural region in their knowledge of official rules, views about misconduct seriousness, views about appropriate discipline, and their expressed willingness to report misconduct. On the other hand, despite identical official rules, we found consistent and large differences in the perceptions of the disciplinary environment prevailing in the two police agencies. Our research expands the existing knowledge of centralized police systems and suggests that, despite many shared features, police agencies within the same system can develop different expectations of integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using anonymous surveys of 3,235 officers in 30 police agencies, we tested hypotheses derived from prior policing research, legitimacy theory, and disciplinary fairness literature on the intentions of police officers to report acts of misconduct perpetrated by fellow officers. We examined features of the normative order involving peer reporting of police misconduct at both the individual agency and aggregate police subculture levels. Consistent with previous research, the perceived seriousness of the offense and legitimacy (endorsement) are consistently strong predictors of officers’ intentions to report misconduct. We also find that perceived fairness of discipline provides significant results, but the direction of the relationship depends on the perceived seriousness of the offense. It is clear that the majority of police officers participate in a shared normative culture of when to and when not to report misconduct. Finally, we note the importance of studying the reporting of police misconduct using a social psychological lens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study seeks to test the capacity to measure individual agency integrity using the theoretical perspective and police integrity instrument developed by Klockars and colleagues. Specifically, sworn officers in a large U.S. municipal law enforcement agency evaluated 11 vignettes describing various forms of police misconduct, from police corruption and the use of excessive force to perjury and planting of evidence. Although our study in Rainless West yields a picture of police integrity that is largely similar to those reported for the three police agencies participating in the study by Klockars and colleagues, we detect substantial differences in the levels of integrity associated with the least serious forms of misconduct. Rainless West offers a lesson for institutions seeking to raise police accountability to explore integrity not only as it applies to the most serious forms of misconduct, but also as it applies to the least serious forms of misconduct. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the evaluations of discipline fairness by 1,006 police officers from different parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Police officers in our 2017 sample were asked to assess the appropriate and expected discipline for police misconduct described in 14 hypothetical scenarios. The majority of the respondents evaluated expected discipline as fair in all the scenarios. There was only one scenario in which a substantial minority of the respondents evaluated the expected discipline as too harsh. The analyses yielded no scenarios in which the respondents assessed the expected discipline as too lenient. Compared to respondents who evaluated discipline as fair, respondents who perceived discipline to be too harsh were more likely to say that they would not report misconduct, but there were no differences in the expressed willingness to report between respondents who evaluated the expected discipline as fair and those who evaluated the expected discipline as too lenient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]