Organizational Culture In Law Enforcement

Police “working personality” is limited by an unquestionable tacit within the police subculture, surrounded by shifting perceptions, depending on the situation.

“Somebody didn’t sleep through ethics training” (Ayer and Fuqua, 2001). This statement made by an officer in the movie Training Day, best exemplifies a major theme of the movie. Training Day should be shown to rookie officers as an example of how a police subculture can allow officers to abuse power. The movie is an over exaggeration, but provides depth and detail into certain situations officers may find themselves in. This paper will look at the specific concepts of a police subculture that officers may encounter.

Background: Every human being has a particular and distinct group where he or she feels they belong. Usually, this makes up a person's identity. However, what really determines an individual's identity within a particular group is the shared norms, practices, beliefs, principles, traditions and vision (Schein, 1992). This is generally referred to as organizational culture, and is particularly important when dealing with certain high-stress careers, law enforcement especially. In order to understand the profundity and richness of every culture, there must first be an idea, either rudimentary or not, lexical or contextual, about the term 'culture.' Culture is "the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people or society." On the other hand culture may be "the totality of a society's distinctive ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge. It exhibits the ways human interpret their environments." Culture is not just society, but for law enforcement, it is a way of being and belonging to a group with (hopefully) shared ideas, dedication to helping society, and of public service. Law enforcement, however, works through a lens of society, and is therefore a part of American culture and various regional subcultures (Crank, 2004).

Skolnick begins by concentrating and analyzing certain elements pertaining to the law enforcement profession. The elements Skolnick identifies are danger, authority, and efficiency in the eyes of the public, which all produces unique cognitive and behavioral responses as officers. To Skolnick this is the working personality aforementioned. Understanding this, Skolnick begins the discussion of how police culture plays into a policeman’s working personality. First it is important to realize that police officers are required to respond to assaults against citizens of the community, as well as the properties and possessions of those people. This has several implications. First, “The policeman, because his work requires him to be occupied continually with potential violence, developed perpetual shorthand’s identify certain kinds of people and symbolic assailants, that is, as persons who use gesture, language, and attire that the policeman has come to recognize as a prelude to violence,” (Skolnick, 143). This concept can be trouble to some, as it seems to have a discriminatory feeling

Kappeler, Sluder, & Alpert (1998) explain that through the police subculture deviance enters into law enforcement. The police character that is developed can be attributed to several paradigms such as psychological, sociological, and anthropological. The individual personalities of an officer and the authoritarian personality, characterized by cynicism, aggression, and conservatism, is that the psychological paradigm analyzes (p. 85). The socialization process which officers experience when they go through the academy, training, and field experience, contrast that dispositional model of the police personality, and this is the focus of the sociological paradigm. When officers internalize these norms and values that are learned, this professionalization occurs. The occupational culture of policing and the -beliefs, attitudes, and values that make up the subculture is seen as the anthropological paradigm or the culturalization perspective (Kappeler, Sluder, & Alpert, 1998, p. 87-88).

In policing today, many wonder how police behave, and how their behavior effects them while on patrol, or on other matters. So far, there have been two perspectives, which have been introduced to try and understand law enforcement behavior, with the two perspectives being universalistic perspective, and the particularistic perspective. When trying to contrast the two perspective, we need a short explanation for each perspective. For the universalistic perspective, it focus on how officers are similar to one another, while also sharing a similar characteristics, and behaviors (Schmalleger & Worrall, 2009). Then with the particularistic perspective, it states that each individual officer is unique when compared to other officers in matters

Terrill and colleagues (2003) were interested in examining the relationship between police culture and the propensity of police officers to use violence during encounters with the public. Using cluster analysis on the interview data they were able to group officers in terms of pro-culture, anti-culture, and somewhere in between. The attributes these researchers

Kappeler, Sluder, & Alpert (1998) explain that through the police subculture deviance enters into law enforcement. The police character that is develop can be attributed to several paradigms such as psychological, sociological, and anthropological. The individual personalities of officer and the authoritarian personality, characterized by cynicism, aggression and conservatism, is that the psychological paradigm analyzes (p. 85). The socialization process which officers experience when they go through the academy, training, and field experience, contrast that dispositional model of the police personality, and this is the focus of the sociological paradigm.

Every culture is composed of four elements: “values, norms, beliefs, and expressive symbols” (Peterson, 1979, p. 137). Each police officer is influenced by the police organizational culture during training. After graduation fro the police academy, the officer is influenced by the more experienced officers of the department. Research conducted by several authors has found that peer influence never ceases even after years of experience in the field.

Police sub-cultures can undermine an agencies code of ethics because it is considered as a blue wall between police officers staying loyal to each other. Their actions are often form when police officers have been working with each other for an extended period. Although it does not affect the code of ethics within the department, but it can affect their ethical behavior. New recruits are told while training in the police academy that a leader does not show emotions. Researchers stated that police officers feel that they are required to be tough on all situations and are forbidden to encourage their fellow officers to talk about each other problems (Malmin, 2012). Supervisors are not aware that their fellow police officers are human beings and

Police Culture in the United StatesAlthough it is senior police management that makes decisions about police strategy, departmental policy, and the allocation of police resources, ordinary officers in fact make the great majority of day-to-day policing decisions. These police officers decide whom to stop, whom to question, and whom to arrest, as well as how best to deal with public concerns and complaints. See really it is ran by the ordinary officer. We used to believe that the “Chief of police” made all the decisions.

Police executives have always had different issues within the police department. Most police executives try to find a quick fix in order to solve the issue of police misconduct. Police misconduct is defined as inappropriate action taken by police officers in relation with their official duties (Police Misconduct Law & Legal Definition, n.d.). In order to solve this issue, one must acknowledge their different challenges, overcome the “code of silence”, and find out the role of organizational culture.

Police behavior plays a gigantic role in whether or not an officer will be willing to use excessive force against a suspect such as their background, training, morals, and composer in stressful situations. In Worden’s article he explains three theories about police behavior that comprise of existing research on police behavior and they’re training. These are sociological, psychological, and organizational theory. He explains sociological theory as the premise that police behavior is

2006, on page 69-70 are as follows : “the nature of the work performed, the persons and problems police encounter while performing the job, and lastly the environment in which police exist”. The difference between police work and other occupational cultures is that police officers work around the clock and every day of the week; even some, are on call as well (Alpert et al., 2006. Pg. 70). They also deal with society as a whole.

Study in organizational culture began in the early 1980s. Organizational culture is “work group culture” and involves organization’s personality. Organizational culture includes shared philosophies, ideologies, beliefs, feelings, assumptions, expectations, attitudes, norms and values (Fred Lunenburg, Allan Ornstein, 2012, p. 55). Most organizational cultures include observed behavioral regularities, norms, dominant values, philosophy, rules, and feelings. Organizational cultures includes certain input such as the energy imported by organizations from the environment in the form of information, people, and materials (Fred Lunenburg, Allan Ornstein, 2012, p. 55). This input energy must guide organizational behavior toward shared goals and process. Organizations produce an output because of the input into the