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Predictors of Texas Police Chiefs’ Satisfaction with Police–Prosecutor Relationships

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Abstract

Although strain in police–prosecutor relationships may be built into the criminal justice system’s checks and balances, the administration of criminal justice can benefit from the adoption of practices which improve these working relationships. A first step towards the adoption of such practices can be taken by first adding to the knowledge base regarding this understudied topic. Using a survey of a state-wide sample of Texas police chiefs, this exploratory study identifies which aspects of police–prosecutor interaction styles are predictors of police chiefs’ satisfaction with police–prosecutor relationships. Results indicate that perceived level of police input in prosecutors’ plea bargain and charging decisions, perceived directness of felony trial preparation communication method, and perceived frequency of decision-maker interactions predict police chiefs’ satisfaction with police–prosecutor relationships. Policy implications are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Sam Houston State University’s Institutional Review Board approved the administration of the survey to human subjects. Informed consent was obtained from all respondents. Respondents were promised confidentiality.

  2. Respondents were instructed to answer all questions in reference to the prosecutor’s office to which the respondent’s police agency regularly refers felony cases.

  3. The sampling frame includes only the heads of those agencies subject to attending TPCLS, which includes the heads of municipal agencies, college campus police agencies, independent school district police agencies, and other special police agencies (Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas [LEMIT], n.d.-b; Vaughn, Cooper, & del Carmen, 2001). Thus, heads of law enforcement agencies who are not required to attend TPCLS, such as heads of county and state police agencies, constables, and chiefs of municipal agencies which serve jurisdictions with populations of 100,000 or more (who are eligible to attend the Texas Major Cities Police Chief Leadership Series), are not part of the sampling frame (Bill Blackwood LEMIT, n.d.-a, n.d.-b; Texas Association of Counties, n.d.).

  4. Five respondents who had at least 50 % missing data were excluded from analyses, as were ten respondents who were heads of other type police departments (including marshal’s offices and agencies serving airports, medical facilities, and aquatic areas), which have functions differing from the municipal, university or college, and school district police departments and would therefore be expected to have differing interactions with prosecutors.

  5. When metric agency size data was unavailable in the UCR, data was collected by telephone inquiry to the police department.

  6. For each composite measure, a one-component CATPCA solution with numeric scaling, which gives equivalent results to classic linear principal components analysis (Linting & van der Kooij, 2012), was similar to the one-component CATPCA solution with ordinal scaling.

  7. The general consensus is that .70 is the lower limit for Cronbach’s alpha when assessing the internal consistency of a scale, although a lower limit of .60 may be acceptable for exploratory research (Hair et al., 2006). A principal components analysis (PCA) solution accounting for 60 % of total variance is considered satisfactory in the social sciences (Hair et al., 2006).

  8. Stepwise multiple regression is appropriate given the exploratory nature of the study (Mertler & Vannatta, 2005).

  9. Using the classification scheme employed by Webb (2007), Stewart (2009) and Stewart and Morris (2009), which is based on the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education’s (TCLEOSE) format, police agencies were classified for agency size, based on number of full-time sworn law enforcement officers employed, as follows: one to five officers is very small, 6 to 25 officers is small, 26 to 50 officers is medium, and over 50 officers is large. Respondents serving a municipal police agency serving a population of 2500 or less and for whom metric agency size data was missing were classified as serving very small police agencies based on typical police-population ratios. In terms of metric agency size, the median was 12 full-time sworn law enforcement officers (M = 25.80, SD = 38.35).

  10. Given the predominance of small and very small police agencies in the national population of police agencies, oversampling will be necessary in order to obtain a sufficient number of respondents employed by large and medium police agencies to facilitate comparisons by agency size.

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Acknowledgments

This study is based on a larger study on police–prosecutor relationships conducted for the author’s dissertation and funded by the Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT). Points of view are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of LEMIT. The author would like to thank LEMIT for facilitating survey administration. The author acknowledges the guidance and feedback provided by the following individuals during the conduct of the larger study: Dr. Larry Hoover, Dr. William Wells, Dr. Travis Franklin, Dr. Rolando v. del Carmen, and Dr. Michael Vaughn. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2014 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences meeting held in Philadelphia, PA.

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  1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Texas A & M University – San Antonio, One University Way, San Antonio, TX, 78224, USA

    Brenda I. Rowe

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Rowe, B.I. Predictors of Texas Police Chiefs’ Satisfaction with Police–Prosecutor Relationships. Am J Crim Just 41, 663–685 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-015-9322-6

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