Terrill, Pauline, and Manning found that there were some notable consistencies of thought across all three groups of police officers concerning use of force in policing. In the second stage of analysis, the authors established three distinct groupings of "pro," "mid," and "con" to distinguish attitudes among police officers regarding use of verbal and physical force when interacting with the public. The authors found all three groups had the highest agreement among the use of verbal force, while there were many variations of thought among groups regarding when it is acceptable to us physical for force when interacting with an individual.
The pro-culture groups were certainly the most willing to use verbal and physical force against an individual and also most closely aligned with a culture of policing in general. This finding by the authors certainly draws a correlation between the fundamental function and culture of police and the institution of policing and state violence, coercion, and oppression. Those who were more adamantly against using violent coercion and physical force against individuals were found to be less aligned with the general culture of policing and the police as a state institution.
The researchers created a three-level (trichotomized) set of attitudes in contrast to most previous analyses that had established a dichotomy between attitudes for and against traditional views of police culture. In addition to “pro” and “con,” they included those falling in the middle, or mid-range.
For the pro group, they concluded that the officers would be more likely to frequently display coercive authority through their behavior; such display could include aggression and the violation of citizen rights. The con-culture group had two clusters that had some variation in attitudinal intensity, views toward citizens, and to some extent, views toward their supervisors. Still, both clusters’ approach to policing was nonaggressive in that they did not support the crime-fighting role or violating citizens’ due process. The mid-range group, also having two clusters, did not reject an aggressive approach but favored its use on a selective basis. Overall, they had positive views of citizens and supervisors and toward following procedural guidelines.
Because "force" includes verbal commands, they found the highest amount of agreement among all three groups regarding approval of verbal force—over 30% in all groups. Regarding physical force, the pro and mid classification officers were very similar, with only the con group significantly different. Over 50% of officers associated the detainee's level of resistance with decisions to use force. There was consistency among different police departments, with differences often pertaining to the number of officers present on scene.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227617486_Police_Culture_and_Coercion
In the second stage of the analysis, the authors looked at whether there was empirical evidence to back up the contrast in attitudes among the three groups of police officers (pro, meaning those officers who were favorable toward traditional police culture), mid (meaning those officers who were in the middle), and con (meaning those officers who were negative toward traditional police culture). After conducting an ANOVA analysis, the authors found that the means of Cluster 1 of the con group differed significantly with the clusters of the pro-group for 7 out of the 10 attitudinal dimensions when compared to Cluster 3, 7 out of the 10 dimensions when compared to Cluster 5, and 5 out of the 10 dimensions when compared to Cluster 7. Cluster 6 of the con group differed from the three pro-groups in eight out of ten dimensions. The authors found that clusters from the mid-group shared attitudes with both the con and pro-groups. You can find the results on page 1017 of the research study.
The authors found that the officers in the pro-culture group most closely agreed with elements of traditional police culture, including distrust of citizens, aggressive policing techniques, and selective law enforcement, while the con group contained two clusters that held the opposite views (trust of citizens, less aggressive techniques, and protection of due process rights). The mid group endorsed views that were in the middle. You might consider the meaning of the evidence the authors found—that there are significant differences in the attitudes of these three groups of officers.
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