In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

123 CHAPTER SEVEN Explaining Bad Behavior Can Criminology Help Us Understand Police Misconduct? With Jonathon A. Cooper and Tasha Kunzi Now we switch gears and return to the larger issue of trying to explain the causes of police misconduct.1 This question brings us back to some important issues raised earlier. The first involves efforts to understand police misconduct from a criminological perspective. The utility of criminological theories for informing criminal justice policy and practice has received a good deal of attention recently. For example, Klofas, Hipple, and McGarrell,2 in their discussion of the success of Project Safe Neighborhood projects, explained how theories of crime can be utilized to better understand problem-oriented solutions to crime problems. Similarly , Barlow and Decker edited a volume explicitly integrating criminological theories in public policy.3 To date, however, there have been surprisingly few applications of criminological theory to the study of police misconduct. The second issue involves the limitations of prevailing definitions of police misconduct. One of the issues that has limited conventional definitions —and the one most relevant for this discussion—involves the difficulty in differentiating between forms of police misconduct that are administrative deviance but not criminal (e.g., failure to take a drug test or moonlighting), and forms that are inherently criminal (i.e., the act would be considered a crime regardless of whether it was committed by a police officer or a citizen—such as burglary). For our purposes here, we set aside this distinction and argue that police misconduct, whether criminal or not, represents deviant behavior; that is, behavior that deviates from expected standards of behavior within the police department. As such, misconduct may be explained by theories of deviant behavior. Importantly, there are several criminological theories that are interested not only in explaining criminal activity, but also in understanding deviant behavior in all its variety. In this chapter we seek to address both of these issues by focusing on the deviant nature of police misconduct and exploring the applicability of criminological theory to the problem. First, however, we review the limited research that has sought to explain police misconduct from a theoretical perspective, most notably the rotten apple perspective, noble 124 Explaining Bad Behavior cause, and Kappeler et al.’s anthropological framework. These theoretical perspectives tend to focus on the individual officer (e.g., psychological ) or are organizational in nature. Then, with this prior work as context, we introduce four widely accepted criminological theories—strain, social learning, self-control, and life course4—and consider each as a framework for understanding police misconduct. For each theory, we offer a brief discussion of its basic assumptions, as well as how it can be useful for the study of police misconduct. We then use each theory as a context within which to interpret the primary findings from the Jammed Up study. Each section concludes with a discussion of “next steps” for the continued and better use of the theory in future police misconduct research. As a word of caution, the reader should bear in mind that this is not a specific test of any of the aforementioned theories. Rather, it is an exploratory venture to raise questions and facilitate discussion about the utility of the theories for understanding misdeeds committed by police officers. Given the paucity in prior efforts to draw on criminological theory and the potential for expanding our understanding of police misconduct, we think it is a worthy exploratory endeavor. Prior Research Using Theoretical Frameworks to Understand Police Misconduct With the exception of a few recent studies, most identified research on police misconduct has been conducted in the absence of rigorous theoretical frameworks.5 This may be in part due to the aforementioned difficulty of fully and clearly defining police misconduct. Although a substantial portion of police misconduct represents administrative non-conformity (similar to non-conformity in other occupational settings) and fits well with organizational theories, a great deal of police misconduct is illegal and may be explained by traditional criminological or justice theories. Regardless , there have been few efforts to apply theoretical frameworks to the problem of police misconduct. The Rotten Apple Theory The rotten apple theory has traditionally been posited by police chiefs when an officer or group of officers engages in police misconduct. The rotten apple theory holds that the officers were involved in their deviant behavior on their own without the knowledge or support of their co-workers and superiors. Continuing the analogy, those officers represent a few bad or “rotten” apples in...

Share