Evaluating The Seriousness of Police Misconduct

Abstract

This article examines citizen and police evaluations of the seriousness of police misconduct. It uses a questionnaire with 10 scenarios describing police corruption and one scenario describing the use of excessive force. The respondents—police officers and college students in the United States and Croatia—were asked to evaluate the seriousness of these scenarios. The results suggest that, although absolute evaluations of seriousness differ, their relative rankings match closely across the two types of respondents (police officers and students) and across the two societies (the U.S. and Croatia). These results expand on previous findings of a shared hierarchy of crime seriousness by showing that the perceptions of the seriousness of police misconduct are shared across cultures, thus transcending national boundaries and suggesting a common understanding of crime seriousness.