Police Behavior, Hiring, and Crime Fighting

An International View

John A. Eterno, Ben Stickle, Diana Scharff Peterson, Dilip K. Das, John A. Eterno, Ben Stickle, Diana Scharff Peterson, Dilip K. Das

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367491000
• eBook ISBN: 9781000417401
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection by internationally recognized authors provides essays on police behavior in the categories of police administration, police operations, and combating specific crimes. Individual chapters strike at critical issues for police today, such as maintaining the well-being of officers, handling stress, hiring practices, child sexual exploitation, gunrunning, crime prevention strategies, police legitimacy, and much more.

Understanding how police are hired and behave is a way of understanding different governments around the world. The book will cover the practices of countries as diverse as China, Germany, India, Japan, Turkey, South Africa, the United States, and others. Readers will be exposed to aspects of police that are rarely, if ever, explored.

The book is intended for a wide range of audiences, including law enforcement and community leaders and students of criminal justice.

Part I

Police Behavior

Chapter 1

Cultivating Well-Being Among Police Officers

Examining Challenges in the Workplace

Philip Birch, Margaret H. Vickers, Sally Galovic, and Michael Kennedy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047117-2

Introduction

This chapter presents qualitative data gathered through an interview process as part of a small-scale exploratory study within New South Wales Police Force (NSWPF), Australia. The exploratory study aimed to support the cultivation of well-being among police officers through examining aspects of the policing environment and workplace. The study on which this chapter is based used a non-probability sample made up of 14 police officers (see Table 1.1), selected from two local area commands (LACs), one command being in a city location, the other command being in a regional location. This approach to sampling was adopted in order to considered differences between police practice in city and regional locations.

The data collected was analyzed using a thematic analysis, resulting in a rich description of the dataset. By using an inductive approach to analyzing the data, according to Braun and Clarke (2006), themes are allowed to emerge from within the data and are not imposed from existing theoretical frameworks. The themes emerging from the dataset centered on three broad themes: Policing and Trust, Surveillance of Police Officers, and Workplace Support Dualities. This chapter considers each of these themes before concluding with a series of recommendations to address the challenges police officers face within their workplace that can enhance and promote well-being.

Policing and Trust

The importance of trust in workplaces, including police organizations (Schafer, 2013), has been discussed at length by previous researchers (Ellwart, Wittek, & Wielers, 2012; Innocenti, Pilati, & Peluso, 2011; Kannan-Narasimhan & Lawrence, 2012; Spector & Jones, 2004; Thomas, Zolin, & Hartman, 2009; Vickers, 2008). The New Public Management’s (NPM) view of organizations has been described as a chain of low-trust, principal/agent relationships, rather than fiduciary or trustee-beneficiary ones (Perry, Engbers, & Jun, 2009) concurrent to NPM being lauded as a reform framework proposed to reverse declining trust in organizations (Yang & Holzer, 2006). While a lack of appreciation for affective responses to workplace events has been found to produce productivity and morale problems (Kiel & Watson, 2009), effective managers know that motivating people, keeping people, and creating productive work environments require positive affect (Kiel & Watson, 2009)—including the presence of trust. The best police leaders have been noted to communicate effectively and promote trust within their work groups: Chief Burtell Jefferson of the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, DC, USA, would be a relevant case in point (Williams & Kellough, 2006). Based on those interviewed, trust is not only desired by members of the NSWPF, but as also an occupational requirement. Trust was reportedly required in many domains and roles of police work: trust between officers doing operational aspects of their job; trust between operational officers and management; officers trusting that the organization would support officers when they needed it; and trust that the organization’s structures, polices, and processes were appropriate and adequate to provide the support that officers felt they needed. The interview data revealed that if trust was absent or doubted, problems would arise. Past research has noted that in all organizations, trust and mutual trust are integral elements of high-performance teams and require close attention by management to maintain (e.g., Kannan-Narasimhan & Lawrence, 2012; Thomas et al., 2009; Vickers, 2008). Trust has also been identified as being fragile and reciprocal in nature: building trust among team members can take a long time but, if betrayed, can take even longer to repair.

Table 1.1 Sample by Gender and Service Length

Gender	Service length
Male	11–20 yrs.
Male	11–20 yrs.
Male	11–20 yrs.
Male	11–20 yrs.
Male	21–30 yrs.
Male	21–30 yrs.
Female	0–10 yrs.
Male	0–10 yrs.
Male	0–10 yrs.
Female	0–10 yrs.
Female	11–20 yrs.
Male	11–20 yrs.
Male	21–30 yrs.
Female	0–10 yrs.

Needing to Trust

Officers spoke frequently and frankly about the need for trust:

But it’s just a matter of knowing who you can trust. As I said, trust is a massive thing.

Officers spoke often of the need for trust but that sometimes it was not present, and needed to be:

When you feel as though you haven’t got the support of those, that you can’t trust them, to be quite honest, they stab you in the back. The cops talk; we’re terrible gossipers. I hate gossip. Rumour, gossip and innuendo just doesn’t wash with me. If someone hasn’t got the balls to say it to your face, my honest opinion is they should just shut their mouth and move on. I’ve got no time for it; I don’t like it. It’s negative.

Trust between operational officers and management has been noted by past researchers as a strong constituent element in what is termed “the psychological contract” (Dick, 2006; Noblet, Rodwell, & Allisey, 2009). The psychological contract is a term used to describe what management expect from its employees, and vice versa. While the contract itself can be dynamic and organic in nature and is usually formed without a specific formula or model, it frequently has a very strong influence on determining behavior within organizations by individuals. Researchers confirm that staff perceptions that the psychological contract had been breached would also be seen as a significant breach of trust.

Trust was a binding factor within many of the workplace relationships for those interviewed for this research. The reading of situations, scenarios, and relationships (with other police and with the community) was reported to be a constituent element that informed the psychological contract that officers believed they had entered into with each other, and with management, on a day-to-day basis. Officers spoke about not just needing their colleagues to be trustworthy individuals, but of their being able to be trusted to do their job competently:

I think people have to earn your trust just as I have to earn other people’s trust. I probably, especially at the upper levels of the police, I understand why some bosses used certain staff, because you trust them… . I’m not talking about the inherent trust is the ethical one and all that sort of stuff. But the trust about, ideally, about whether they can get the job done needs to be built up with me. They have to show that they can actually do it and that sort of thing. I get disappointed if people let you down, especially if you communicated on X, Y, Z being done, and it doesn’t get done at once.

The data also revealed a need for trust that can manifest either consciously or unconsciously and in numerous areas. This need for trust was in several areas: between police officers working together, between police officers and the senior hierarchy of the organization, and with the broader community. Given the inherent risk of police work, trust was seen to be essential to the role and process of police work so that officers might execute their professional responsibilities adequately, but also with a sense of security and confidence, feeling that the organization and its management would be behind them if they faltered or struck trouble:

Being able to trust the people you work with, having confidence in the people you work with. At the end of the day, if I’m working with you, my life is in your hands and my partner. So, I’ve got to be able to trust you knowing full well that I’ve got the utmost confidence in my work colleagues; that they’ve got my back, I’ve got their back.

Researchers such as Dick (2006) have confirmed that when trust is precarious, or absent, the entire psychological contract, whatever it might comprise, can be called into question. This, in turn, can be very detrimental to working individuals, especially their ability to function effectively and remain motivated. If officers felt their psychological contract with management had been breached or not fulfilled by the other party, the sense of betrayal accompanying this could undermine existing trust even further. This has been confirmed in the literature and can potentially harm the organization in a number of ways: through lowered morale; reduced motivation; and increased leave-taking, absenteeism, and resignations. There was evidence of this in our data. For example, one officer reported that they had been bullied at work, but they did not trust the organization or senior colleagues enough to share the difficulties they were experiencing on the job. This officer’s reported view was that if they had reported the bullying to a senior colleague, this would have made matters worse for them. At the time of interview, the bullying had, fortunately, ceased, and this officer confirmed that they were very relieved they had told no one:

Upon reflection, I’m glad I didn’t go to a sergeant. I’m glad I didn’t go to anybody in the police force and tell them what I was going through. Because of course, you’ve got that kind of trust or whatever. But ultimately, he’s going to have to go to that [other officer] and say, “What’s going on?” And they’re going to talk and everything else comes from that and it happens again.

The importance of trust in a positive workplace culture and in supporting officer well-being cannot be overstated. While requiring further evidence to confirm the substance of possible difficulties around trust between officers and within the organization, it is the case that if officers could not trust the organization, its processes, and its management to support them, this would be highly likely to have a negative impact on their well-being, performance, motivation, desire to return to work after stressful events, and their intention to remain with the organization.

Staff Turnover

Staff turnover was also recognized as a clear problem by NSWPF management (NSWPF, 2013), but also by police officers interviewed. Evidence of their concern and some of the possible reasons for it emerged in some of the respondent stories. NSWPF research (NSWPF, 2013) has already confirmed that many officers are still leaving the organization on stress-based medical discharge and that between January 1, 2009, and May 18, 2011, 66% of officers leaving the organization had received a medical discharge. The peak age of discharge (post 1988, with claims) was 36 to 40 years (44%). The majority (82%) of medical discha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ Introduction
• Series Editor’s Preface
• List of Contributor Biographies
• Part I Police Behavior
• Part II Hiring and Training
• Part III Crime Control
• Index