NCJ Number
202967
Journal
Criminal Justice and Behavior Volume: 30 Issue: 5 Dated: October 2003 Pages: 538-558
Date Published
October 2003
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This article describes the construction of two scales to measure police attitudes toward the selective enforcement of the law.
Abstract
Despite the scope and importance of police discretion, there has been very little direct psychological examination of police decisionmaking. A series of three studies was conducted to explore the dimensional structure of police attitudes toward discretion, develop psychometric scales with which to measure those dimensions, and examine the relationships between the dimensions of police discretion and other relevant psychological and demographic variables. The results showed that attitudes toward discretion involved two major factors, and two scales were developed to measure these dimensions. The Service-Legalistic (S-L) scale differentiates police along a continuum from flexible (service-oriented) to inflexible (legalistic) with respect to the enforcement of the law. Police at the service end of the scale endorse the use of discretion as an appropriate response to social problems and those at the legalistic end oppose discretion because it compromises the principle of equality before the law. The Watchman (WM) scale examines the use of discretion to maintain control. High scorers on the WM scale advocate at the same time ignoring crime in some circumstances and getting tough with offenders in others. Service-related discretion was found to negatively correlate with authoritarianism and the belief that crime is caused by the individual dispositions of offenders, whereas the reverse is true for legalistic discretion. Watchman-related discretion positively correlated with authoritarianism ethnocentrism, and a belief in individual crime causation. These findings suggest that one reason that general scales do not always predict criminal justice decisionmaking is that decisions are not necessarily based on a single rationale. One finding was the nonsignificant correlation between the S-L scale and participants’ gender. The reliabilities of the two scales were modest but sufficient to justify their use in future research. It is important to test the scales on samples encompassing a wider range of police experience. Also, it is necessary to examine the relationship between the scales and other measures of discretion. 3 tables, 43 references