Related Papers
The effects of work orientations on job satisfaction among sheriffs' deputies practicing community-oriented policing
John Cochran
Numerous prior studies have explored the level of job satisfaction of police officers. Some research has also focused on officer perceptions of community policing as practiced in municipal police agencies. There has been little empirical research on either topic conducted in sheriffs' offices throughout the US. The present study examines the relative effects of work orientation on levels of job satisfaction among deputy sheriffs in an urban sheriff's office which practices community policing on an agency-wide basis. Our findings suggest service-oriented deputies are somewhat more satisfied with their jobs than their crime control oriented counterparts.
Revisiting Quantitative Accountability Indicators in Municipal Police Departments and County Sheriffs’ Offices
Casey LaFrance
LaFrance & Placide (2010) leveraged several items from the 2003 Law Enforcement Management and Statistics (LEMAS) dataset to offer comparisons of accountability priorities between county sheriffs and municipal police chiefs. In order to determine if their findings are consistent over time, we replicate the original analyses with the most recent publicly available iteration of this dataset, offering data which was collected in 2007. Along with our replication, we improve upon the original study by including a practitioner-oriented interpretation of our results from the perspective of police operations and organizational culture. Our findings indicate an impressive degree of consistency with the original study. We conclude by suggesting methods by which scholars can build upon our work and practitioners can apply the findings to police operations.
Doing Justice, Doing Gender: Women in Legal and Criminal Justice Occupations
The Nature of Police Work and Women's Entry into Law Enforcement
Nancy Jurik
Public Officials and a “Private” Matter: Attitudes and Policies in the County Sheriff Office Regarding Violence Against Women
Mirya R Holman
Objective This article examines sheriffs’ attitudes and their offices’ policies concerning violence against women and assesses the connection between their attitudes and policies. Methods Using data from an original, national survey completed in the fall of 2012 of elected sheriffs (N = 553), we evaluate a battery of rape and domestic violence myths and examine the presence of various violence against women policies. Results We find that many sheriffs express belief in inaccurate myths concerning violence against women. We find strong connections between sheriffs’ attitudes about women's equality and their attitudes about violence against women. In turn, their attitudes about gender-based violence relate to training and policies for addressing these cases. Conclusion In an office like that of the sheriff, with both bureaucratic and political elements, attitudes of political leaders influence policies. Our findings suggest an important connection between elected officials’ attitudes and policy actions beyond the traditional legislative arena.
Feminist Criminology
Constrained Agency Theory and Leadership: A New Perspective to Understand How Female Police Officers Overcome the Structural and Social Impediments to Promotion
2018 •
Tara Shelley
Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management
Effects of police agency diversification on officer attitudes
2017 •
Megan Alderden
Purpose In light of recent calls to increase the diversity of America’s police, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of agency and leadership diversification on officer job satisfaction and reported perceptions of fairness within the organization, factors known to influence retention and performance. Design/methodology/approach A survey of 15,236 officers representing 88 agencies was used, as well as other agency- and community-level variables. Multi-level models were used to assess how these individual- and agency-level variables, including measures of diversification, affected job satisfaction and perceptions of fairness. Findings Diversification in agency leadership positions was found to improve perceptions of fairness among all officers, in addition to ameliorating some feelings of unfairness among African-American officers. Diversification of the sworn ranks, in comparison to the population of the community, however, was not found to significantly affect the outc...
South Carolina law enforcement census 2007 (2008 report)
Robert J Kaminski
Every two to three years the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the United States Department of Justice conducts a comprehensive survey of law enforcement agencies titled Law Enforcement Management and Statistics (LEMAS). The survey covers a variety of issues on agency capacity, operations, equipment and various special topics. The survey is administered to all law enforcement agencies in the United States with 100 or more sworn personnel and a sample of agencies with less than 100 officers. While this survey is informative for general knowledge on law enforcement agencies across the United States, it has limitations in providing information on South Carolina law enforcement agencies. The most important of these limitations is that only a portion of South Carolina agencies are captured by this sampling approach. For example, the 2003 version of the LEMAS survey only included 42 South Carolina agencies. Given there are nearly 300 law enforcement agencies at the municipal, county and sta...
OFFICER WORK ORIENTATIONS, PERCEPTIONS OF READINESS AND ANTICIPATED EFFECTIVENESS OF AN AGENCY-WIDE COMMUNITY POLICING EFFORT WITHIN A COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE
John Cochran
Across occupations of every form, including those in criminal justice, administrators, managers, and s~qTervisors frequen@ introduce changes to the structure ar~or processes of the work environment. These changes may be seen as necessary to enhance worker productivity, but may be viewed by some workers as an unwanted disruption to their routines. ShouM employees interpret changes in such a manner, they can, arm often do, negate these reforms. Employee work orientations O.e., philosophical approaches toward work) undoubtedly play a role in such an interchange because they influence both how employees behave on the job and how they perceive their job. The move toward community.oriented policing constitutes a major paradigm shift to the practice of law enforcement. This structural and procedural change to the routines of policing couM be perceived as threatening to those law enforcement officers whose work orientations are inconsistent with the philosophical fotandalion of community-based policing. The presence of a sufficient number of such officers couM doom this movement to failure. This study uses survey data collected from a sample of sheriff's deputies involved in an agency-wide community policing effort. In this study we examine the effects of deputies' work orientations on their perceptions of the agency's readiness for and the anticipated effectiveness of this initiative. The findings suggest interesting differences in the efforts of a traditional crime control orientation versus a more progressrve community service orientation toward policing.
The myth(?) of the police sub-culture
John Cochran
This study examines empirically the extent to which there is evidence of an endemic sub-culture of policing among a sample of sheriffs' deputies. While failing to observe widespread adherence to the sub-cultural norms and values suggested in the literature, such adherence is observed among a subset of our sample. Advanced statistical techniques (i.e. cluster analysis and discriminant function analysis) are then used to create, replicate, and validate a numerical taxonomy of policing. The taxonomy reveals three types of law enforcement orientations: ``Sub-Cultural Adherents,'' ``COP Cops,'' who represent a nouveau sub-culture strongly committed to public service, and``Normals,'' who, on average, are quite average and are not especially committed to either sub-cultural form. Both those working in the sociology of work and occupations and those in industrial/occupational psychology acknowledge that employees tend to adopt job-specific sub-cultural responses (i.e. shared beliefs, attitudes, values, and norms) to the contingencies they experience in their organizational and. Criminologists working within these perspectives have consistently noted the unique sub-cultural responses of criminal justice practitioners, especially law enforcement and correctional officers, given the particular characteristics of these fields. That is, the occupational environment of criminal justice includes exposure to human misery, exposure to great situational uncertainty, and exposure to intrinsic danger, all coupled with high levels of coercive authority and``invisible discretion'' granted to these officers which enable them to carry out their mandates. Moreover, most criminal justice employees work in unique organizational environments which expose them to rigid, militaristic authority structures with fixed lines of command and communication that are coupled with often vague and conflicting The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy
SURVEY SAYS: POWERFUL SHERIFFS SUCCESSFULLY LIMIT THE RISE OF CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT
2022 •
Sharon Fairley
