Police Attitudes and Behavior

Social science research has long been concerned with the relationship between people's attitudes and their behavior. Early theories of learning, for example, regarded positive attitudes as the key link that enables knowledge to influence behavior. Later psychological research showed that it also is possible for persons' behavior to influence their attitudes. Much of the scholarly work on police has focused on this relationship as well, seeking to describe police attitudes and to understand any resulting impact on officers' behavior on the job. Early works on the police, such as Jerome Skolnick's (1966) Justice Without Trial, William West-ley's (1970) Violence and the Police, and William Ker Muir's (1977) Police: Streetcorner Politicians, are richly detailed accounts of police attitudes and behavior within a particular police department. These early works were instrumental in identifying the existence of a police subculture—the norms and values that arise out of the police work environment, shaping a perspective [Page 1155]or outlook that is unique to police officers. Most of the attitudinal themes identified in the police subculture have been negative—for example, police distrust of citizens, authoritarianism, cynicism, and extreme loyalty to fellow officers that can prohibit full police accountability (in other words, the “blue wall of silence”).

Early studies on police attitudes also provide a sociological interpretation of policing, focusing on the features of the work environment in which officers are embedded rather than on the characteristics of individual officers. In other words, sociologists concentrate on describing the forest instead of the trees in the forest. These studies make it clear that to understand police behavior it is more important to take into account the distinctive qualities of police work (for example, the low visibility and reactive nature of most patrol activity), the characteristics of police departments (for example, their quasi-militaristic organization and authoritarian management style), and the factors present in many police-citizen encounters (for example, most are citizen initiated and noncrime related) than it is to take into account officers' individual background characteristics, such as their race, sex, economic status, or education level. Most of the existing qualitative and quantitative research supports a sociological interpretation of police behavior over an individualistic interpretation.