The Construction of a Minority Group Identity Among Police Cadets

• In Event: The Evolving Experiences of Female and Minority Officers in Policing

Abstract

Police culture includes the values, norms, perspectives and craft rules which inform police conduct, including a powerful code of solidarity with other police officers and thus a strong social identity. Most discussions about police culture assume that cadets are homogeneous in terms of past experiences and perspectives. At the same time, there is evidence that a significant portion of workers’ views are set by the time they become actual police officers. This study surveyed a total of 1777 pre-university college students (2/3 in police technology) at different stages of their training in the province of Quebec (Canada) during the year 2015. Respondents were first questioned about their general appreciation of the police compared to the majority of people. They were then asked to rate their own level of agreement with fictional videos of controversial police interventions but also what they thought the general public opinion would be. Results suggest that, unsurprisingly, students in police technology are significantly more supportive of the police in general than students of other programs, and that this level of support varies little over the course of their three-year program. More importantly, our results indicate that police cadets increasingly share similar opinions about specific interventions.

Authors

• Annie Gendron, École nationale de police du Québec

• Rémi Boivin, Université de Montréal

• Camille Faubert, Université de Montréal