Measuring Police Integrity

Abstract

To measure police integrity, we designed and pretested a questionnaire that sought to answer in a systematic, standardized, quantitative manner the five questions presented at the end of the last chapter. These questions, and the action response they demand, are crucial to both an organizational/occupational-culture theory of police integrity. At the same time, they satisfy some basic informational needs of practical police administration:

• 1. Do officers in this agency know the rules?

• 2. How strongly do they support those rules?

• 3. Do they know what disciplinary threat this agency makes for violation of those rules?

• 4. Do they think the discipline is fair?

• 5. How willing are they to report misconduct?

The questionnaire presented police officers with eleven hypothetical case scenarios. The scenarios, displayed in Exhibit 2.1, cover a range of corrupt behavior from that which merely gives an appearance of a conflict of interest (Case 1) to incidents of bribery (Case 3) and theft (Cases 5 and 11).

Portions of this chapter are based upon work previously reported in Carl. B. Klockars, Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, William E. Harver, and Maria R. Haberfeld, The Measurement of Police Integrity, (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, August 1997).