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 few scenarios.
Research limitations/implications
– The analytical strategies were limited by the number of police administrations in the country.
Practical implications
– The results indicate that levels of police integrity in large, centralized organizations vary across units and that the characteristics of the communities the police are a contributing factor to these differences. At the same time, organizational characteristics carry substantial weight.
Originality/value
– Prior studies of police integrity focussed on the organizational aspects (the first three dimensions of the theory); the present paper extends the literature to ascertain the importance of the larger environment and its characteristics for levels of police integrity (the fourth dimension of the police integrity theory).
Decades of empirical research have shaped our understanding of organizational justice in the workplace and public assessments of police procedures on the street, but only recently has a nascent wave of research sought to better understand the role that officer perceptions of supervisory procedural justice play in shaping their (un)fair interactions with the public. The nascent research testing this relationship has focused on the evidence that officer perceptions of trust in the public is a pathway between internal procedural justice and external procedural justice. This article tests the role of trust and a parallel pathway that incorporates the concepts of work engagement and personal initiative in the procedural justice literature. Relying on a survey of 638 Croatian police officers, this study finds that the effect of supervisory procedural justice on officers’ external procedural justice is positive but indirect through a measure of trust in the public and the proposed engagement/initiative mechanism. The implications of these findings for research and police practice are discussed.
The main purpose of the study was to explore the effects of carrying police equipment on spatiotemporal and kinetic gait parameters. Two-hundred and seventy-five healthy men and women attending police academy (32% women) were randomly recruited. Gait analysis without and with a police equipment load (≈3.5 kg) was analyzed using the Zebris pressure platform. Differences and effect sizes were calculated using a Student t-test and Wilcoxon test for dependent samples and Cohen’s D statistics. In both men and women, carrying police equipment significantly increased the foot rotation (effect size 0.13–0.25), step width (0.13–0.33), step time (0.25), stride time (0.13–0.25) and peak plantar pressure beneath the forefoot (0.16–0.30), midfoot (0.15–0.32) and hindfoot (0.13–0.25) region of the foot. Significant reductions in the step length (0.12–0.25), stride length (0.14–0.23), cadence (0.15–0.28) and walking speed (0.20–0.22) were observed in both sexes. Although significant, the effect sizes were mostly trivial in men and small in women. Our study shows significant changes in the spatiotemporal and kinetic gait parameters when carrying police equipment for both men and women. Although the effect sizes are trivial to small, carrying police equipment of ≈3.5 kg may have a negative impact on gait characteristics in first-year police officers.
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