Policing Styles - Notes on an Empirical Synthesis of Wilson and Muir

• NCJ Number: 75852
• Journal: Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 8 Issue: 4 Dated: (1980) Pages: 327-334
• Author(s): S M Talarico; C R Swanson
• Date Published: 1981
• Length: 8 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Revised version.

Annotation

An empirical analysis of policing styles is conducted to determine the correlations between particular combinations of police stylistic compatibility or conflict, basic attitudinal postures and police officers' perception of organizational and work group features.

Abstract

The study is based on policing typologies constructed by James Q. Wilson and William Ker Muir. Wilson's work focuses on departmental approaches to law enforcement, while Muir examines individual police perspectives. Both emphasize, however, that style is a critical component of law enforcement policy, and both reveal patterns of compatibility and conflict. To empirically synthesize Wilson's and Muir's analyses of police style, a survey of uniformed officers assigned to field duty was conducted in 18 police departments in 15 States from local government units ranging from 25,000 to 250,000 population. The survey instrument adopting style scales from Wilson and Muir's works was designed to test simple congruity of policing style along three lines of comparison: individual officer and supervisor, individual officer and squad, and individual officer and department. Results show that compatibility of style between the individuals and their supervisors clearly is the most important, while analysis of variance tests on the other two dimensions yielded little of significance. On the first analysis of variance test (individual v. supervisor), job satisfaction, perception of supervisor support, perception of departmental discipline, and assessment of managerial orientation all associate significantly with style. Findings suggest that Wilson and Muir's concepts provide a useful basis for examining the interrelation of politics and criminal justice, and also indicate that efforts to deal with police satisfaction and incentives for potential improvements in performance should be concentrated at the line level. An appendix, a table, and 24 references are provided.