Abstract
Recent protests against law enforcement have spurred claims by practitioners and editorialists that public antipathy toward the police may influence police occupational norms. A number of classic police ethnographies also suggest a link between perceived public antipathy and police culture, but limited empirical research has examined this claim. Using a sample of 12,376 sworn law enforcement officers who participated in the National Police Research Platform, and a series of ordinary least squares regressions, this study examines whether officers’ perceptions of public support predict their cultural orientations. Results reveal that officers perceiving greater public antipathy report higher levels of social isolation, work-group solidarity, cynicism toward the public, and coercive attitudes. We identify practical implications and potential organizational remedies to address these perceptions, and situate these findings within theoretical arguments of early police ethnographers and contemporary claims of the “Ferguson Effect.”
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Notes
LEMAS includes the population of local US law enforcement agencies over 100 sworn employees, hence delineating the lower bound for sampling. This also ensured a sufficiently large sample of officers were available to participate in the survey.
Even nonresponse, then, suggests cultural themes of cynicism, isolation, and solidarity, justifying missing data analysis. Nonresponse rates were compared to organizational variables (such as agency size, organizational structure, and city characteristics) as well as overall agency demographics (including gender, race, and military history) in order to evaluate possible nonresponse bias. Missing data were uncorrelated with agency characteristics, and discrepancies between survey demographics and overall agency demographics were rather small, with supervisors and white officers slightly overrepresented (Rosenbaum et al., 2011). It stands to reason that officers choosing not to respond to specific demographic questions out of fear of retaliation or harassment are likely to be those who most embrace the traditional police culture, characterized by cynicism, distrust, and insularity. Given that age, race, and years of experience were the most commonly missing variables, we examined how nonresponse to these items correlated with our outcome measures (isolation, solidarity, cynicism, coercion, and TPC) and key explanatory variable (perceptions of public antipathy). Few of these relationships were statistically significant and none were substantive. Officers who chose not to respond to the age question were slightly more likely to report social isolation (r = 0.02, p < 0.01). Officers who chose not to disclose their race were more likely to report perceptions of public antipathy (r = 0.04, p < 0.001) and social isolation (r = 0.02, p < .01). Officers with missing or invalid data for years of experience also reported higher perceptions of public antipathy (r = 0.02, p < .05) and social isolation (r = 0.02, p < .05). No other relationships attained statistical significance, and none exceed (r = .04). This analysis (not shown) is available upon request. The pattern of nonresponse would downwardly bias our regression coefficients, underestimating the strength of the proposed relationships and reducing the likelihood of committing a type I error.
Given considerable debate about the most appropriate measure for inter-item correlation (Elsinga, Te Grotenhuis, & Pelzer, 2013), several are reported here for the reader’s consideration. Several of our measures demonstrate modest reliability coefficients. This is, in part, attributable to the small number of items used in each scale. Furthermore, a limited number of response categories (here, a 4-point Likert item) has been associated with lower internal consistency in multi-item scales (Preston & Colman, 2000). We address concerns about the reliability of outcome measures through the use of an omnibus measure of traditional police culture, described later.
Although it might appear that the perceptions of public antipathy scale has overlap with the dimension of cynicism toward the public, confirmatory factor analysis shows that these dimensions are indeed distinct. For the two-factor solution, χ2(4) = 227.78 RMSEA = 0.070 with an upper bound of 0.078, CFI = 0.972, TLI = 0.931, and SRMR = 0.026 which is within the range of acceptable fit (Hu & Bentler, 1999) and fits better than a one-factor solution (where χ2(4) = 734.68, RMSEA = 0.113, CFI = 0.910, TLI = 0.820, and SRMR = 0.049). Based on the results of the two-factor solution, we can conclude that perceptions of public antipathy and cynicism toward the public are empirically distinct.
We also examined several alternative modeling strategies (not shown). Given that the dependent variables are ordinal rather than interval, ordered logistic regression was analyzed, but the dependent variables violated assumptions of parallelism, complicating interpretation (O'Connell, 2006); nonetheless, the findings did not substantively differ from the OLS models presented here. Given that officers are clustered within agencies and violate the assumption of independence of observations, we also analyzed various hierarchical linear models, which examined both random intercepts and random coefficients, where appropriate (Luke, 2004). ICC’s were low (1–4%) and our parameter estimates and p-values were quite similar to the more parsimonious and interpretable models presented here. Finally, we also calculated standard errors for OLS models using the cluster option in STATA, which relaxes the assumption of independence (StataCorp, 2007). The small changes to the calculated standard errors had no effect on inferences of statistical significance. Our evaluation of alternative models suggests that, especially given our large sample size, our linear models are extremely robust to small deviations from OLS assumptions. Our chosen models also permit the calculation and meaningful interpretation of standardized beta coefficients, in order to evaluate the relative influence of our predictors on cultural outcomes.
Table 2 also indicates potentially problematic collinearity between respondent age and experience (r = .77) (see Licht, 1995). Given this high correlation, additional model diagnostics—variance inflation factors (VIFs) and condition indices--were also examined. VIFs did not exceed a value of 3, below the problematic threshold of 5 (Rogerson, 2001), but condition indices were at 31 with the inclusion of both the age and experience variables in the models, slightly exceeding the problematic threshold of 30 (see Belsley, Kuh, & Welsch, 1980). These additional diagnostics indicate that collinearity could bias regression estimates. To determine whether this was the case, alternative regression models, which excluded either age or experience, the highly correlated variables, where examined. Results from these models are substantively similar to those reported here. That is, officer perceptions of public antipathy are consistently and significantly, positively associated with each outcome of interest. In these alternative models, condition indices all fell below 30, and VIFs fell below 2. Given the concordance across these different models, we present the full models (e.g., those containing both age and experience) in the current text.
There is evidence for both: Baltimore police officers began de-policing in the wake of protests in Ferguson, but withdrew even further following local protests stemming from the death of Freddie Gray (Morgan & Pally, 2016).
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to send sincere thanks to those who provided invaluable feedback to improve this manuscript: Dr. George Burruss, Dr. Lorie Fridell, Dr. Justin Nix, and the anonymous reviewers. The data used in this study were retrieved from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Data were collected for The National Police Research Platform, Phase 2 (ICPSR 36497).
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Marier, C.J., Moule, R.K. Feeling Blue: Officer Perceptions of Public Antipathy Predict Police Occupational Norms. Am J Crim Just 44, 836–857 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-018-9459-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-018-9459-1