Willingness to Adhere to the Police Code of Silence and Evaluations of Police Corruption Seriousness

• In Event: POLWG Panel 8. Police Misconduct, Whistleblowing and the Code of Silence

Abstract

Existing research on the police code of silence suggests that the code protects many forms of police misconduct from being reported to the supervisors. In this paper, we argue that the code of silence is not a flat prohibition of reporting and that the factors relevant for the police officers’ willingness to adhere to the code of silence could vary in accordance with the perceived seriousness of examples of police corruption. Based on a sample of 500 police officers from Croatia, we empirically test the hypothesis that the seriousness of police corruption is linked to the specific factors related to the officers’ decision to adhere to the code of silence. We utilize the police integrity questionnaire to measure the police officers’ willingness to adhere to the code of silence across six police corruption scenarios, ranging from the most serious ones (e.g., theft from a crime scene) to the least serious ones (e.g., acceptance of gratuities). We assess the relative strength of the traditional police integrity variables—evaluations of behavior as a violation of official rules, views about the expected discipline, expectations that other police officers would not report—on police officers’ willingness to adhere to the code of silence across scenarios of different levels of seriousness.

Authors

• Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, Michigan State University

• Yongjae Nam, University of Texas at San Antonio