Police Culture and Officer Behavior: Application of a Multilevel Framework

Abstract

Although recent advancements have been made in the understanding and studying of police culture, several significant gaps remain, including deficiencies in theoretical development and the lack of research on culture's influence on police practice. In the current study, we apply a multilevel theoretical framework to the examination of officers’ cultural attitudes and behavior to help bridge these gaps. In doing so, police culture is treated as a collective feature of patrol groups as opposed to as an individual‐level attribute. Furthermore, we extend previous work by introducing the concept of culture strength as a moderator of the culture–behavior relationship. After drawing on survey and behavioral data from a national multimethod project, we then test this framework with two empirical examples from each of the primary work environments (i.e., street and organization) in which police culture originates and operates. The findings reveal that workgroup culture is associated with officers’ behaviors, representing a collective effect, and that the relationship between culture and behavior may not always be linear. The results provide support for incorporating a multilevel approach to the study of police culture and officer behavior.

The commemoration of death, organizational memory, and police culture

“…Cultural stability, then, instead of being the mechanical product of consistent pressures in the working environment of police (Loftus, ), is likely also influenced by the actions of police themselves. Thus, although the findings of this research show support for the results of past work in which officer‐level culture results from the mediation of occupational culture through the police organization and the pressures of police work (Ingram et al., , ; Paoline, ; Paoline & Gau, ), it also challenges a strictly top‐down, “filter” model of police culture. Not only does culture filter down to be reflected by organizations and individuals in context‐specific ways, but individual and organizational behaviors reproduce the occupational culture in which they are embedded.…”

“…Finally, though attitudinal measures provide analytic consistency across studies (Engel & Worden, ; Ingram et al., , ; Paoline, ; Paoline & Terrill, ; Terrill et al., ), such survey research is also constrained by practical limitations of survey methodology. In particular, the high resource cost of surveys prevents an exhaustive battery of items to capture the full gamut of occupational features that affect police culture (Ingram et al., , p. 377).…”

“…Most recently, Ingram et al (2018) extended this filter model to investigate the effect of police culture and "cultural strength" on officer behavior in the same five departments. In line with some past research findings (McCluskey, Terrill, & Paoline, III, 2005;cf.…”

“…Given the persistent link between danger and such highly damaging behavioral outcomes, it is crucial to understand how the deaths of police officers—even if they are statistically rare—influence the culture that in turn shapes officers’ action on the street. Building on past research in which scholars conceptualized police culture as a multilevel phenomenon mediated by police organizations (Ingram, Paoline, & Terrill, ; Ingram, Terrill, & Paoline, ; Paoline, , ), I use ethnographic observations and interviews across three urban police departments to shed light on how officers and police organizations actively reproduce a police culture that emphasizes danger and death. Leveraging concepts from the literatures on police, culture, memory, and organizations, I describe how commemorative cultural artifacts—the tangible, observable symbols that reflect the values and assumptions of a group (Schein, )—are employed by individual officers and police organizations to construct an organizational memory in which dangerous police work is emphasized in ways intimately shaped by localized context and history.…”

Network exposure and excessive use of force

“…Research on police misconduct can be (broadly) classified into two groups: studies in which officer attributes are emphasized as correlates of misconduct (i.e., “rotten apples”) and studies in which departmental or even institutional attributes are emphasized as a key to understanding misconduct (i.e., “rotten barrels”). Study findings from both perspectives have led to the identification of a host of risk factors associated with misconduct ranging from a general focus on individual‐level correlates of an officer (e.g., gender, race, age, and rank; Bloch & Anderson, ; Wolfe & Piquero, ) to organizational and occupational factors set forth by police administrators (e.g., Hickman, Piquero, & Piquero, ; Kappeler et al., ; Weisburd, Greenspan, Hamilton, Williams, & Bryant, ; Wolfe & Piquero, ), to police culture and socialized behaviors (e.g., Chappell & Piquero, ; Herbert, ; Ingram, Terrill, & Paoline, ).…”