The Croatian Emigrants’ Views of Police Integrity in Croatia and the United States

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.