NCJ Number
216612
Journal
Criminology Volume: 44 Issue: 4 Dated: November 2006 Pages: 925-960
Date Published
November 2006
Length
36 pages
Annotation
This study examined factors that influenced citizens’ judgments of appropriate punishment for police misconduct.
Abstract
Generally, there was agreement among participants about which factors were important to consider in judging a fair punishment for police misconduct. Results indicated that citizens’ judgments of just punishment were mainly informed by police behavior and the circumstance of the incident. As citizens’ judgments of seriousness increased, so did their judgments of appropriate punishment. Most participants, however, expressed reservation about highly severe punishment or prison time, which was rarely appropriate in the types of vignettes used in this study. Findings also indicated that participants’ political orientation (conservative versus liberal) predicted their opinions about appropriate punishment for police misconduct, while their social status, including their race, did not predict their opinions. In terms of implications for public policy, the findings suggest that the community standard for judging police misconduct appears to be even handed. The study used a factorial survey, in which 1,100 randomly selected adult participants in New York City were presented with a series of vignettes describing incidents of police misconduct along with a series of questions regarding their opinions of the police misconduct and about just punishments. The survey was administered between June and August 2002 and used the Random Digit Dialing sampling technique. Regression models were used to analyze the data. Future research should focus on the specific ways in which the background characteristics of citizens lead to the imposition of different degrees of punishment for comparable levels of police misconduct. Tables, footnotes, references