Organizational Culture In Law Enforcement

This essay discusses the effects of the police organizational culture on a Police officer’s ability to make independent decisions.

In Jerome H. Skolnick’s “A Sketch of the Policeman’s ‘Working Personality’”, Skolnick explores the view that because their role contains the two important variables of danger and authority, officers develop a distinctive view of the world compared to those of other professions. He then goes on to illustrate how, what he calls the “working personality”, affects the actions of police officers.

“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.

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

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

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).

The organization culture as a leadership concept has been identified as one of the many components that leaders can use to grow a dynamic organization. Leadership in organizations starts the culture formation process by imposing their assumptions and expectations on their followers. Once culture is established and accepted, they become a strong leadership tool to communicate the leader 's beliefs and values to organizational members, and especially new comers. When leaders promote ethical culture, they become successful in maintaining organizational growth, the good services demanded by the society, the ability to address problems before they become disasters and consequently are competitive against rivals. The leader 's success will depend to a large extent, on his knowledge and understanding of the organizational culture. The leader who understands his organizational culture and takes it seriously is capable of predicting the outcome of his decisions in preventing any anticipated consequences. What then is organizational culture? The concept of organizational culture has been defined from many perspectives in the literature. There is no one single definition for organizational culture. The topic of organizational culture has been studied from many perspectives and disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, organizational behavior, and organizational leadership to name a few. Deal defines organizational culture as values,

In his view, the subculture itself, characterizes the public as hostile, potentially violent, and not to be trusted; which requires mutual support, secrecy and unity from the police (Scaramella et al , 2010, 99). The same subculture of police will deteriorate the sense of community from officers in favor for views and beliefs within the police services. Soon after minority police officers are hired into the police services, they begin to shape around police culture. Minority police officers can adopt an attitude that complies with existing police culture in order to succeed in the job and detach themselves from the community in favor of "professionalism." (Ben-Porat, 2008, 16). Police efforts to recruit minorities to stop under-policing and over-policing are in fact diminished by police culture. Although the police services may seem like they are creating a better image for themselves, the police culture itself is hindering minorities from relating to and changing their minority groups. Police culture is the main reason behind police acting and viewing minorities the way they do. Furthermore, the changing of police culture doesn’t come from the hiring of minorities but rather the changing of police services themselves. Training the police to be

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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

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