Eugene A. Paoline

Taking stock: Toward a richer understanding of police culture

Police researchers have long speculated on the importance that culture plays in the everyday functioning of officers. Most characterizations of police culture focus on describing the various elements and facets of a single phenomenon among occupational members (e.g., group loyalty, crime fighter image, organizational tension with supervisors, etc.). Little work has been done in synthesizing what we ‘‘know’’ about this occupational culture, as textbook depictions highlight broad generalizations that tend to differ from text to text. A conceptual model of the police occupational culture is presented here that explains its causes, prescriptions, and outcomes. This monolithic model is then critiqued based on research that highlights the complexity of culture, noting variation across organizations and within by rank and style. The article also assesses the ways in which police culture thought is beginning to change, as departments diversify demographically and philosophically. The article concludes with recommendations for future studies of police culture. D 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Police culture, individualism, and community policing: Evidence from two police departments

According to the conventional wisdom, the police culture consists of a set of values, attitudes, and norms that are widely shared among officers, who find in the culture a way to cope with the strains of their working environment. Some research implies that the conventional wisdom is overdrawn, and recent research has begun to question it more directly. Changes in the composition (i.e., the race, sex, and education) of police personnel, as well as philosophical and organizational changes associated with community policing, could be expected to further fragment police culture and to shift the distribution of police attitudes. Here we examine variation in outlooks that, according to conventional wisdom, are part of the police culture, using survey data collected in two police departments. We also examine the relationships between these outlooks and characteristics of officers—sex, race, education, length of service, community-policing training, and community-policing specialist assignment—that are associated with the changes in policing. We find that officers outlooks do not conform to the pattern that we would expect on the basis of conventional wisdom. We also find that the variation in officers occupational attitudes is not patterned to a great extent by their characteristics. We conclude with directions for future research on police attitudes.

Police Education, Experience, and the Use of Force

Police researchers have devoted a considerable amount of empirical attention to testing the impact college education has on police performance. The counterargument to the education debate is that experience, in learning the police craft, is what contributes to differences in performance. The current study adds to both lines of research by examining the impact of education and experience on one of the core features of the police role: the use of coercion. The findings indicate that varying levels of education and experience are related to differences in the use of coercion in encounters with citizens. Encounters involving officers with any college education result in significantly less verbal force compared to those with a high school education. However, only those encounters involving officers with a 4-year degree result in significantly less physical force. Finally, encounters involving officers with greater experience result in less verbal and physical force.

Shedding Light on Police Culture: An Examination of Officers’ Occupational Attitudes

Research on police culture has generally fallen within one of two competing camps—one that depicts culture as an occupational phenomenon that encompasses all police officers and one that focuses on officer differences. The latter conceptualization of police culture suggests subcultures (or at least segmentation) that bound or delimit the occupational culture. Using survey data collected as part of the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN) in two municipal police departments, the research reported here examines the similarities and differences among contemporary police officer attitudes in an effort to locate some of the boundaries of the occupational culture of police. Seven analytically distinct groups of officers are identified, suggesting that officers are responding to and coping with aspects of their occupational world in different ways. The findings call into question some of the assumptions associated with a monolithic police culture.

The Influence of Individual, Job, and Organizational Characteristics on Correctional Staff Job Stress, Job Satisfaction, and Organizational Commitment:

As staff performance is vital to the survival of correctional institutions, much empirical attention has been paid to studying the causes and consequences of their attitudes and behaviors. The current study adds to this body of knowledge by examining the factors that explain three central occupational attitudes—job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. More specifically, using survey data collected from a large county correctional system in Orlando, Florida, this research assesses the impact of key demographic, job, and organizational characteristics within and across jail staff attitudes toward job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. This article finds that the more powerful predictors of each of these attitudes are job and organizational characteristics. Among the dependent variables, job stress has an inverse relationship with job satisfaction, and job satisfaction had a powerful positive association with organizational commitment.

Women Police Officers and the Use of Coercion

Abstract Despite numerous advances in the last thirty years, women police officers continue to face acceptance issues in a male-dominated occupation. Qualitative accounts of policewomen have noted that many of the integration barriers stem from traditional assumptions about police work, much of which revolves around the cultural mandate to display ones coercive authority over citizens. Female officers are often perceived as unwilling (or lacking in ability) to use coercion when encountering citizens. Unfortunately, little empirical evidence is available to support this claim, as gender studies that specifically examine the use of coercion have tended to focus on excessive force. Using data collected as part of a systematic social observation study in Indianapolis, Indiana, and St. Petersburg, Florida, this research examines both verbal and physical coercion that policewomen use in day-to-day encounters with citizens. The results of this study challenge one of the most fundamental stereotypes levied against women police officers. Contrary to traditional assumptions, female police officers (compared to their male counterparts) are not reluctant to use coercive force, and examinations of both verbal and physical force reveal few differences in not only the prevalence of each behavior, but also in the commonly associated explanatory factors. The article concludes with the implications of these

The impact of police culture on traffic stop searches: An analysis of attitudes and behavior

Purpose – To examine the extent to which cultural fragmentation among police officers results in differences in searches of suspects and their surroundings during proactive traffic stops.Design/methodology/approach – Cluster and multivariate analyses are performed utilizing survey and observational data collected as part of the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN).Findings – Differences in search behavior among patrol officers are found as a result of variation in cultural alignments. That is, patrol officers that adhere to the culture (in varying degrees) from an attitudinal standpoint are more likely to engage in searches than those who most ardently resist cultural attitudes.Research limitations/implications – Although the classification scheme captured many of the core attitudes associated with police culture, it did not measure all of them. Also, the departments studied would compare to most American municipal police organizations, but would make poor comparisons to very large urban or small rura...

A Calm and Happy Keeper of the Keys: The Impact of ACA Views, Relations With Coworkers, and Policy Views on the Job Stress and Job Satisfaction of Correctional Staff

Job stress and job satisfaction have both received a considerable amount of attention among studies of organizations in general, and correctional organizations are no exception. Although many work-related factors have been used to explain these two concepts, several important areas have been excluded. The current study builds on existing research by examining job stress and job satisfaction and how they are affected by American Correctional Association (ACA) standards, relations with coworkers, and prison policies. Using survey data collected from a large county correctional system in Orlando, Florida, the findings suggest that ACA views, relations with coworkers, and institutional policies all have significant effects on job stress and satisfaction of correctional staff. The authors also find that these three work environment variables have a far greater magnitude of effects than do the personal characteristics of employees.

THE GOOD LIFE: THE IMPACT OF JOB SATISFACTION AND OCCUPATIONAL STRESSORS ON CORRECTIONAL STAFF LIFE SATISFACTION—AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

ABSTRACT During the past twenty years, there has been significant growth in the literature on correctional staff Much of this literature has examined how the work environment helps shape the job satisfaction of correctional employees. Conversely, little empirical attention has been devoted to the broader concept of life satisfaction. The current study attempts to fill this empirical void by examining whetherjob satisfaction and occupational stressors (in the forms of job stress, work-family conflict, role stress, and perceived dangerous) had any impact on the life satisfaction of correctional staff. Based on a multi-variate analysis, we find that job satisfaction, job stress, work-family conflict, and dangerousness had significant effects on life satisfaction. An additional analysis of the effects of life satisfaction revealed a significant relationship to workers’ turnover intentions.

The Impact of Centralization and Formalization on Correctional Staff Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment: An Exploratory Study

While the amount of research on prison organizations is increasing, most of the publications in this area have focused on the relationship between organizational centralization and correctional staff job satisfaction. The impact of organizational formalization has been largely ignored. The current study utilized survey responses from 272 staff at a Midwestern high security state prison to examine various forms of centralization and formalization in an attempt to understand their impact on correctional staff job satisfaction and organizational commitment. With respect to the two major dimensions of centralization noted by previous research (i.e., decision‐making input and job autonomy), it was found that low levels of staff input into decision‐making and low levels of job autonomy both had significant negative effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment for both the full sample of employees, as well as the subsample of correctional officers. In addition, formalization was found to have significant positive impacts on both job satisfaction and organizational commitment for the full sample of correctional staff, while mixed results were found for the subsample of correctional officers.