A Survey of Quebecois Police Attitudes toward Corruption: Effects of Police Culture and Organizational Culture

By Alain Marc
English

Problems of police corruption and non-ethical practices have generally been analyzed from an a-posteriori perspective. Research and literature on these topics are essentially based on case analysis and commissions of inquiry reports. These endeavours were necessary to better understand the phenomenon at hand as well as to construct a typology of police deviance. They did little, however, to help prevent the occurrence of these problems, especially when they are found to be recurrent and occurring at almost all levels of a police department. In these cases, the idea of the “rotten apple” would then have to be replaced by a concept that has gradually been recognized as its more realistic alternative, that is that “the barrel is rotting the apples.” A first step in grasping the problem from an a-priori perspective is to better understand the attitudes of police officers regarding their reluctance or compliance to report their fellow officers’ corrupt conduct and their reasoning about the limits of police discretion and the margins of police authority. Using survey tools originally developed by Weisburd and al. (2000) and Klockars and al. (2000), we surveyed a representative sample of 455 Quebec police officers. We focused on the reasons why an officer might or might not report instances of conduct that clearly violate police professional ethics. Discriminating three types of respondents (the reluctant, the relativist and the compliant), the analysis obtained from three sets of logistic regressions showed what differ from one type to the other in terms of the level of experience, the conceptualization of police work and the attitude toward police culture. The conclusions obtained from this study might help Quebec’s major police agencies in orienting their preventive efforts at the main determinants of police officers conceptualization of corrupt conducts without squandering precious resources on the less important factors.

Keywords

  • POLICING IN QUEBEC
  • POLICE CULTURE
  • POLICE ETHICS
  • POLICE DEVIANCE
  • ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
  • POLICE DEVIANCE CONTROL
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