Irena Cajner Mraović

Police Training and Education: The Croatian Perspective

The police educational system in Croatia consists of three fundamental components: basic education and training (schooling and retraining of new police officers); professional improvement, specialization, vocational training as the system of permanent lifelong education of police officers which starts with entering the police and ends with retirement; university and college degree. The organizational structure of the Croatian Police Academy reflects this classification so there are three main educational organizational units in the Police Academy: the Police School, the Department for Professional Improvement and Specialization, and the Police College. During recent years, the Croatian Ministry of the Interior has been making significant changes. War and postwar police has been transforming into a new one, which is suitable for a modern democratic world. The war caused great changes in the number and the educational level of police officers so the educational system is one of the main resources of changes and progress. This gives particular meaning to the discussion about reform at the Police Academy and the Police College.

An empirical test of the influence of society at large on police integrity in a centralized police system

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the theory of police integrity, particularly its fourth dimension, on a centralized police agency and to assess the degree to which levels of police integrity are related to the characteristics of the larger environment. Design/methodology/approach – In 2008, a stratified representative sample of 945 Croatian police officers from ten police administrations evaluated 11 hypothetical scenarios describing a range of various forms of police misconduct. The questionnaire measures officer views regarding scenario seriousness, appropriate and expected discipline, and willingness to report the misconduct. Findings – Bivariate analyses show that police officers’ evaluations of seriousness differed across categories of police administrations for more than one-half of the scenarios. Multivariate analyses reveal that, once organizational predictors are entered into the models, community characteristics remain significant predictors of seriousness evaluations for only a f...

Does the police code of silence vary with police assignment? An empirical exploration of the relation between the code and assignment

ABSTRACT 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.