Police in the Making: Career-Job Motivation and Procedural Justice Cultivation among Police Cadets

• In Event: Cross-Cultural Studies on Crime and Criminal Justice

Abstract

Procedural justice in policing has received numerous empirical supports for its importance in democratic police-citizen interactions and arguably police legitimacy. In addition, prior research revealed a plausible model of procedural justice from “inside-out” within police organizations. Built upon this framework, we used police cadet survey data from Taiwan to explore the impacts of police career-job motivations on procedural justice cultivation and whether cadets’ self-legitimacy mediate the relationship between internal- and external- procedural justice. Structural Equation Modeling was employed to analyze the data, and the findings supported our hypothesized impacts of career-job motivation and self-legitimacy. The present study contributed to theoretical development through testing the framework in a non-Western democracy and offered implications in cadet training.

Authors

• Shun-Yung Kevin Wang, TAMU System - Tarleton State University

• Kevin Buchanan, Tarleton State University