Colquitt (2001) suggested that organizational justice consists of four distinct dimensions. These dimensions are distributive justice, procedural justice, interpersonal justice, and informational justice. *Distributive justice* refers to the fairness of decision outcomes (Adams, 1965; Colquitt, 2001; Deutsch, 1975; Homans, 1961; Leventhal, 1976). It is about the justice in the distribution of organizational resources. *Procedural justice* refers to "justice of the processes that lead to decision outcomes" (Colquitt, 2001: 386). Procedural justice is attained by giving employees a voice in the decision-making process or infuence over the decision outcomes, or by commitment to just process elements (Thibaut & Walker, 1975). A fair decisionmaking process should involve consistency, lack of bias, correctability, representation, accuracy, and ethicality (Leventhal, 1980; Leventhal et al., 1980). *Interpersonal justice* refers to the level of respect and propriety that employees receive from their supervisors (Colquitt, 2001). *Informational justice* refers to the way employees are treated by their supervisors. It is about whether supervisors treat their subordinates with dignity, respect, in a polite manner, and without improper remarks or comments (Colquitt, 2001).

# **Effects of Organizational Justice on Police Attitudes and Behavior**

The relationship between organizational justice and organizational outcomes in corporate environments has been examined by several studies (Bechtoldt et al., 2007; Byrne, 2005; Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2001). The research has demonstrated that corporate employees who experience fair behaviors from their supervisors are more likely to engage in positive organizational behaviors, and show greater job satisfaction and productivity (Ambrose & Schminke, 2009; Byrne, 2005; McFarlin & Sweeney, 1992). The research has also indicated that the existence of organizational justice in corporate environments tends to reduce the number of behaviors that are in confict with organizational rules, goals, and expectations (Colquitt et al., 2002; Fox et al., 2001).

Organizational justice means more to police offcers and correctional offcers compared to corporate employees (Wolfe & Lawson, 2020). Because police offcers and correctional offcers are exposed to danger on a daily basis, are accountable for their wrongdoings, and are expected to respond to a variety of problems, they have to deal with a signifcant amount of uncertainty (Wolfe et al., 2018). Wolfe et al. (2018) argue that organizational justice greatly helps police offcers and correctional offcers to handle this uncertainty. Thus, organizational justice has been considered to be an important predictor of positive and negative work attitudes and behaviors among criminal justice employees.

Cohen-Charash and Spector (2001) suggest that organizational justice has effects on the attitudes of the employees and, therefore, infuences job performance. Lind and Tyler (1988) found a positive correlation between perceived organizational justice and employee's evaluation of the organization, commitment, and loyalty to the organization. In another illustrative study, Rosenbaum and McCarty (2017) revealed that, when the offcers observe higher levels of organization-wide, supervisory, leadership, and diversity justice, they display higher levels of positive behaviors (i.e., organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and rule compliance).

Indeed, organizational justice is perceived to be positively associated with desirable behavior in police agencies (Kutnjak Ivković & Saueman, 2016; Kutnjak Ivković & Shelley, 2010; Wolfe & Piquero, 2011). Tyler et al. (2007) found that police offcers who report positive views of organizational justice were more likely to follow organizational rules and defer to organizational policies. Similarly, Haas et al. (2015) found a positive correlation between fair treatment by the supervisors and police offcers' compliance with agency policies. Rothwell and Baldwin (2007) also found a positive relationship between perceived organizational justice and willingness to report police misconduct. Similarly, Kutnjak Ivković and Sauerman (2016) found that South African police offcers who felt there was procedural justice in police disciplinary processes were less likely to say that they would adhere to the code of silence.

The research fndings have consistently demonstrated a positive association between perceptions of organizational justice and adherence to rules and policies of the agencies (Bradford et al., 2014; Haas et al., 2015; Kutnjak Ivković & Shelley, 2010; Kutnjak Ivković & Sauerman, 2016; Reynolds & Helfers, 2019; Rothwell & Baldwin, 2007; Tyler et al., 2007, Wolfe & Piquero, 2011). Several studies have attempted to explain why this association exists, and have found that attitudes of the offcers toward their organizations might have a potential mediating effect on the association between organizational justice and rule adherence (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2001; Dick, 2011; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tankebe, 2010). Some researchers have argued that organizational commitment serves as a potential mediating mechanism (Fridell et al., 2020; Lind & Tyler, 1988).

Farmer et al. (2003) studied the perceptions of American police offcers and found a positive correlation between organizational justice and organizational commitment. Subsequent studies found additional evidence that perceived organizational justice is positively related to organizational commitment among police offcers in Australia (Carless, 2006) and South Korea (Crow et al., 2012). In their meta-review, Donner et al. (2015) documented that perceptions of organizational justice are positively correlated not only with organizational commitment, but also with job satisfaction, trust in the administration, compliance with decisions, and willingness to report misconduct. Similarly, perceived fairness of organizational decision-making process has been found to have a signifcant effect on trust in the agency, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and desire to stay with the agency (Crow et al., 2012; De Angelis & Kupchik, 2007; Myhill & Bradford, 2013; Wolfe & Piquero, 2011).

Additionally, research on organizational justice has found signifcant evidence indicating a correlation between procedural justice during the selection process and fairness of the screening test. For example, Truxillo et al. (2002) explored the perceptions of police applicants in the Southern USA about their experiences during the recruitment and selection stage. Truxillo and colleagues' fndings (2002) revealed a positive association between perceived procedural justice in the selection process and fairness of the screening test/timeliness of the feedback. Carless (2006) examined the perceptions of police applicants in Australia and found a positive relationship between perceived procedural justice during the selection process and perceived outcome fairness. Farmer et al. (2003) found a positive correlation between perceived fairness and decision-making in the selection process of undercover offcers. Crow et al. (2012) also found a positive relationship between perceived organizational justice and decision-making in job rewards and performance evaluations.

Furthermore, extant research suggests that police offcers who believe their supervisors are fair in their organizational behaviors are more likely to treat citizens with procedural justice (Tankebe, 2014). Van Craen and Skogan (2017) also explored the effects of internal procedural justice on offcer-citizen interactions, and found that when police offcers receive fair treatment from their supervisors, they are more likely to follow the procedural justice concepts of "respect," "voice," and "accountability" in their interactions with citizens. Along the same lines, research by Bradford et al. (2014) yielded evidence that British police offcers' perceptions of

organizational justice are associated with an increase in their positive views of community policing and with greater self-reported compliance.

# **Organizational Justice and the Code of Silence**

While prior studies have tested the effect of organizational justice on police attitudes and behavior in general, no prior study of which we are aware has directly tested its effects on the police offcers' code of silence. Yet, numerous researchers and theorists have reported a negative correlation between organizational justice and deviant behaviors/police misconduct (Bradford et al., 2014; Haas et al., 2015; Kutnjak Ivković & Sauerman, 2016; Tyler et al., 2007: Wolfe & Piquero, 2011), thus suggesting that the protection of police misconduct committed by fellow offcers should also be related to organizational justice.

Previous research has shown that employees who feel they are not fairly treated are more likely to engage in retaliatory behavior (Barclay et al., 2005), theft (Colquitt, et al., 2006), cyberloafng (Lim, 2002), and harmful behavior to organizational property (Colquitt et al., 2001). As a negative workplace behavior, police misconduct has been an issue of great concern in contemporary societies (Fridell et al., 2020; Lersch, 2002; Palmiotto, 2001; Van Craen & Skogan, 2017). Because of its potential to produce adverse consequences for the individual offcer, the individual citizen, the community, and the police profession, the issue of police misconduct was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing in the United States (2015). The fnal report (2015) of the President's Task Force suggests that procedural justice within the police organizations is an important facet of addressing the issue of police misconduct.

Van Craen and Skogan (2017) also noted that offcers' direct supervisors are of crucial importance in police organizations because their behaviors shape the offcers' perceptions, including their perceptions of organizational justice. If they are not fair and rule-bound, offcers are more likely to display negative behaviors in their interactions with citizens. In line with this, research by Haas et al. (2015) explored non-compliance by police offcers. They studied the perceptions of police offcers of the Metropolitan Police in Buenos Aires and found that fair treatment by supervisors and fair decision-making may facilitate the implementation of organizational policies and contribute to a reduction in police misconduct.

Wolfe and Piquero (2011) explored the effects of organizational justice on police offcers in Philadelphia; they found a negative correlation between organizational justice and noble-cause corruption, citizen complaints, number of internal affairs investigations, and number of departmental charges. Furthermore, results from Tankebe's (2014) study showed a negative association between organizational justice and the use of force. Not surprisingly, the fndings of Donner et al. (2015) also revealed a negative relationship between organizational justice and police offcers' determination to engage in police misconduct. In their study of the relationship between organizational justice and police offcer attitudes toward misconduct,

Fridell et al. (2020) found a direct correlation between perceptions of organizational justice and the police offcers' support for misconduct.

# **This Chapter**

Extant research on the code of silence has demonstrated that organizational variables are the critical predictors of the police offcers' expressed willingness to report, while individual characteristics do not serve as such strong predictors. In this chapter, we expand the traditional police integrity approach by incorporating the effect of organizational justice on the police offcers' adherence to the code of silence. While prior studies have tested the effect of organizational justice on police attitudes and behavior in general, no prior study of which we are aware has tested its effects on the attitudes toward different forms of police misconduct, including police corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance.

# **Methodology**

# *Sample*

In the later 2010s, we have surveyed police offcers from a medium-size municipal police agency in the United States. Our sample includes 148 sworn police offcers. For characteristics of our sample and police agency, please see Chaps. 1 and 2.

# *Measures*

The analyses presented in this chapter explore the effects of organizational justice on the respondents' expressed willingness to report misconduct. Our measures of police integrity, including the code of silence, come from the new version of the police integrity questionnaire (Kutnjak Ivković et al., 2019) that includes scenarios dealing with police corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance. After the respondents read each of these 12 scenarios, they were asked to answer seven identical questions, including questions asking the respondents to assess misconduct seriousness, their familiarity with offcial rules, their estimates of the appropriate and expected discipline, and their willingness to report misconduct. For details, please see Chaps. 1 and 2.

#### **Dependent Variable**

The dependent variable in this chapter is the respondents' expressed *own adherence to the code of silence* for reporting misconduct. It is built upon the answers to the question asking the respondents their willingness to report misconduct described in each scenario. While answering this question, the respondents could have selected an answer from a 5-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 = "defnitely would not report" to 5 = "defnitely would report." The measure of code of silence was created by recoding the variable such that values of 1 and 2 (i.e., generally unwilling to report) were coded as a 1 with other values were coded as a 0.

#### **Organizational Independent Variables**

The organizational variables in our models include measures of the respondents' *own evaluations of misconduct seriousness*, their estimates of whether the misconduct described in the scenario *violates offcial rules*, their estimates of *expected discipline,* and their estimates of *most police offcers' willingness to report*. For a more detailed description, please see Chap. 2.

#### **Organizational Justice Independent Variables**

The questionnaire also contained separate questions measuring various subdimensions of organizational justice, based on the study by Wolfe et al. (2018). The measure was comprised of 14 items that depicted *procedural justice* (six items), *distributive justice* (four items), and *interactional justice* (four items). The specifc items and their descriptive statistics are presented in Table 4.1. For each item, the respondents could have selected one answer from a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 = "strongly disagree" to 5 = "strongly agree."

All items were subjected to principal axis factoring to determine how the items loaded onto latent constructs. This process initially yielded two factors that had a fair degree of conceptual overlap between both factors (i.e., a high number of double loading items). The number of double loading items suggested the factor analysis may be over-extracting factors based on the number of items (Thompson & Daniel, 1996). In essence, the algorithm is primed to identify more factors rather than fewer factors. This frequently occurs when there is a high degree of correlation between the constructs, as was the case here (ρ = 0.57). This is a common problem in organizational justice research (Colquitt & Shaw, 2005). To address this issue, we created a *global measure of organizational justice* comprised of all the items, which had evidence of validity (the values of λ, as shown in the last column of Table 4.1, are high, with average value of 0.71) and reliability (α = 0.93).

#### **Table 4.1** Organizational justice

(α = 0.93)

The bivariate relationship between our latent measure of organizational justice created here and the measure of disciplinary fairness (i.e., −1 for lenient punishment, 0 for fair discipline, and + 1 for harsh discipline), the relationships are inconsistent across scenarios and rather modest in magnitude (i.e., −0.15 < ρ < 0.15). This suggests that, while the measure of disciplinary fairness may be related to the measure of organizational justice, the two measures are certainly not redundant.

#### **Individual Independent Variables**

Several variables measured the respondents' demographic characteristics: *length of service, gender, assignment, supervisory status*, and *education*. Because of the small sample size, we used these demographic characteristics as the control variables in our multivariate models. Please see Chap. 2 for details.

# *Analytic Strategy*

The analyses again proceed in two stages. The frst stage examines the relationship between our latent measure of organizational justice and adherence to the code of silence for each of the 12 scenarios. These are estimated as a series of point-biserial correlations between adherence to the code of silence (1 = yes) and the continuous measure of organizational justice. The second stage of the analyses looks at the multivariate relationships between the traditional police integrity measures, the latent measure of organizational justice created, and measures of the code of silence for each of the scenarios. The multivariate models are again estimated using the cross-folding LASSO technique for inference with the same controls as prior chapters. For additional details on this technique, please see Chap. 2.

# **Results**

# *The Effects of Organizational Justice on the Code of Silence*

We frst analyzed the bivariate relationship between the latent measure of organizational justice created (items listed in Table 4.1) and the adherence to the code of silence for each of the scenarios (Table 4.2). The results indicate that, generally speaking, there is a negative relationship between the adherence to the code of silence and organizational justice. This is consistent with prior research on the topic of organizational misconduct (e.g., Colquitt & Shaw, 2005).

There are a few exceptions to this rule (Table 4.2). In particular, there are four scenarios (shooting suspect in back; supervisor fails to stop beating, cover-up of DUI crash, and false rumors about coworker) for which the perceptions of organizational justice and the code of silence are positively correlated, thus contraindicating the results from the prior research. However, in only two of these scenarios (shooting a suspect in the back and covering up a DUI crash) the results are statistically signifcant. It is unclear what is different about these scenarios compared to the others, although two of the contraindicated fndings are scenarios depicting the excessive use of force.

Next, we look at the average value of ρ between organizational justice and adherence to the code of silence across the four different types of scenarios (i.e., corruption, excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance). The strongest and most consistent predictors are for police corruption (with the average relationship *M* = −0.21, SD = 0.04), followed by organizational deviance (*M* = −0.13, SD = 0.24), interpersonal deviance (*M* = −0.07, SD = 0.16), and, lastly, the use of excessive force (*M* = −0.01, SD = 0.26). Overall, these results suggest that organizational justice has a more consistent relationship with adherence to the code of silence for certain types of scenarios than others.

**Table 4.2** Bivariate association between organizational justice variables and code of silence

# *The Effects of Organizational Justice and Police Integrity on the Code of Silence*

Prior to looking at the results of the organizational justice measure, let us examine the results from the traditional police integrity measures from Chap. 2. The results are presented in Table 4.3. Overall, the results from the other police integrity measures remain relatively consistent with the fndings from Chap. 2, although the addition of organizational justice does stabilize some of the estimates a bit (i.e., homogenizes the standard errors), which results in some effects being statistically signifcant here, but not in Chap. 2.

#### **Police Corruption**

The results for the traditional police integrity measures remain relatively consistent with the models in prior chapters. Specifcally, for corruption, we note that, compared to the baseline models, we see that the substantive interpretation remains relatively consistent with the results from Chap. 2. In fact, all the same variables are signifcant and, apart from the effect of others' adherence to the code of silence, all other variable effects were slightly diminished compared to the baseline models. The only exception to this general rule is the strength of the relationship between the anticipated other police offcers' adherence to the code of silence and offcers' own adherence to the code of silence for the scenario depicting supervisory errands,

**Table 4.3** Organizational justice effects on the code of silence

*Notes*: \* = *p <* 0.05, \*\* = *p <* 0.01, \*\*\* = *p <* 0.001; − = parameters excluded due to collinearity a Reference category is "intermediate discipline"

where the effect was augmented by 50.86% with the addition of organizational justice compared to the baseline models. In other words, in the case of supervisory corruption, an offcer's willingness to adhere to the code of silence—as of that of his/her peers—is strongly infuenced by perceptions of organizational justice.

The effect of organizational justice on adherence to the code of silence is negative for the *corruption* scenarios, although it is statistically signifcant in only two of the three scenarios (gifts, theft from burglary). The effects of organizational justice are stronger in the least serious scenario (i.e., accepting free gifts; OR = 0.45, *p* < 0.001), compared to the most serious corruption scenario (i.e., theft from a crime scene; OR = 0.72, *p* < 0.001). We offer a potential explanation for this fnding. Theft from a burglary scene is typically identifed as the most serious scenario by offcers, and is the scenario in which the lowest percent of the offcers indicated that they would not report. As such, the effect of organizational justice may be limited because of the more ubiquitous willingness to report this sort of behavior (i.e., only 5% of offcers reported being *unwilling* to report this behavior). Conversely, the scenario receiving free gifts is seen as least serious and most likely to be protected by the code of silence (i.e., more than 65% of offcers reported being *unwilling* to report this behavior).

#### **Use of Excessive Force**

We now turn to the effects of organizational justice on adhering to the code of silence for scenarios depicting the *use of excessive force*, also shown in Table 4.3. We start by comparing the results of the traditional measures of police integrity to those from the baseline models presented in Chap. 2. Again, we see almost the same pattern of results as those from Chap. 2, although the inclusion of the organizational justice variable slightly changes the magnitude of the effects for the traditional police integrity variables in the scenario in which a supervisor failed to report a beating. The others' perceived adherence to the code of silence remains signifcantly and positively associated with the respondents' own anticipated adherence to the code of silence in the new models. Furthermore, the estimated other police offcers' adherence to the code of silence is the strongest predictor of an offcer's own adherence to the code of silence in the use of excessive force scenarios.

Perceptions of organizational justice are unrelated, both substantively and signifcantly, to the adherence to the code of silence for the scenarios depicting the use of excessive force. It may be that, in these sorts of situations, the effects of organizational justice are masked by feelings about the likely fairness of the discipline that an offcer is likely to receive given the national discourse about police use of force. In other words, because of the sensitive nature of police use of force in modern American society, without considering the fairness of the discipline (see Chap. 3), the effects of organizational justice may remain hidden because of the politically sensitive nature of these scenarios.

#### **Organizational Deviance**

The effects of organizational justice on adherence to the code of silence in organizational and interpersonal deviance scenarios are presented in Table 4.3. We start by examining the effects of the traditional police integrity variables and note that, after the inclusion of organizational justice, the results are similar to those from Chap. 2, with some key differences. For example, while the perceived others' adherence to the code of silence is still signifcantly associated with an offcer's own adherence to the code of silence in these situations, the effects are diminished. Furthermore, in the scenario of a false sick report from an offcer, we can no longer estimate the independent effect of others' adherence to the code of silence because it becomes a perfect or redundant predictor (i.e., those, and only those, who feel that others would not report, will not report themselves).

 After all, minor discipline compared to intermediary discipline increases the risk of adherence to the code of silence, while termination compared to intermediary discipline signifcantly reduces adherence to the code of silence. It is unclear why for only this scenario offcers express this type of sentiment. One salient and potentially relevant fact is this is the only situation in which a non-involved offcer may have his/her life affected. In other words, an offcer calling out sick may mean that someone else would get held over to cover for that shift or the offending offcer's colleagues may be forced to work harder in his/her absence.

Next, we turn to the results of organizational justice on the adherence to the code of silence in these organizational deviance scenarios. Here, organizational justice exerts an inconsistent relationship on the adherence to the code of silence for these three scenarios. In the scenario depicting the cover-up of a DUI crash involving a fellow offcer, perceptions of organizational justice are signifcantly related to the adherence to the code of silence (OR = 1.18, *p* < 0.05), whereas organizational justice exerts a negative effect for false reporting of overtime (OR = 0.61, *p* < 0.001) and no signifcant effect on reporting an offcer for a false sick report.

#### **Interpersonal Deviance**

Finally, we turn to the results for interpersonal deviance, also presented in Table 4.3, and present the results for the traditional police integrity measures. There are two patterns of results of particular relevance. First, the effect of recognizing that a particular scenario is a violation of department policy exerts an inconsistent effect across scenarios. For the scenario involving yelling at coworkers, this effect is positive (OR = 2.61, *p* < 0.001). For spreading false rumors about a coworker, the effect is negative (OR = 0.37, *p* < 0.001).

This conjecture may be supported by the second interesting fnding here. Notably, offcers report that any form of discipline—especially dismissal—increases adherence to the code of silence in a particular situation. In other words, these two fndings may suggest that police offcers may not see these scenarios as deviant and, accordingly, their decision to report is based on the perceived harm relative to the perceived likelihood in how the situation will be handled.

The effect of organizational justice is again not as consistent in these scenarios as in others. Perceptions of organizational justice should reduce the likelihood of adhering to the code of silence for telling sexist jokes and yelling at coworkers, yet they are not statistically signifcant. In fact, perceptions of organizational justice are only signifcantly associated with an increased likelihood of adhering to the code of silence in the scenario depicting spreading false rumors about a coworker (OR = 1.50, *p* < 0.001). This fnding is unexpected. Generally, in an agency in which an offcer perceives higher levels of organizational justice, the offcer should feel more comfortable reporting when a member of the organization is being treated unjustly by another member, but that does not seem to be the case here. Without additional data, we cannot explore what is different about this scenario relative to the others so that it causes this fnding.

# **Conclusion**

The police are given the power and authority to control the behavior of others, and they are expected to carry out their complex and diffcult tasks with integrity. Although the most troublesome or tragic examples of police misconduct (e.g., the George Floyd case) constitute a small fraction of daily police-citizen interactions, police misconduct creates an aura of suspicion, mistrust, and uncertainty. Police misconduct is a serious matter whenever it occurs, and it has far-reaching consequences for the employee, the police profession, and ultimately for the whole society (Kappeler et al., 1998; Lersch, 2002). Therefore, it is essential to study the effcacy of the mechanisms that are utilized to prevent police misconduct. In this chapter, we tested the organizational justice effects on the police offcers' willingness to report misconduct on the scenarios describing police corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance.

Our bivariate analyses revealed a negative relationship between organizational justice and the respondents' adherence to the code of silence in two-thirds of the scenarios (8 out of 12). This fnding is consistent with the extant research (e.g., Carless, 2006; Colquitt & Shaw, 2005; Crow et al., 2012; Haberfeld & Kutnjak Ivković, 2015; Myhill & Bradford, 2013; Tankebe & Meško, 2014; Wolfe & Lawson, 2020; Wolfe & Piquero, 2011; Wu & Maken, 2019). In two of the twelve scenarios (i.e., shooting suspect in back; cover-up of DUI crash), we found a positive and statistically signifcant relationship between organizational justice and the adherence to the code of silence, which does not ft well with the fndings reported in previous research. It is unclear why the relationship is positive in these scenarios.

Furthermore, our bivariate analyses yielded strong evidence indicating that organizational justice has a more consistent relationship with the adherence to the code of silence across certain types of scenarios. We found that the organizational justice is the strongest and most consistent predictor of the adherence to the code of silence for police corruption scenarios. The effects on the organizational deviance scenarios and the interpersonal deviance scenarios are somewhat less consistent, while organizational justice was not linked with the adherence to the code of silence for the excessive force scenarios at all.

Not surprisingly, our multivariate analyses yielded a negative relationship between organizational justice and the respondents' own determination to adhere to the code of silence across the corruption scenarios. This negative relationship is signifcant for two of three corruption scenarios (i.e., gifts, theft from burglary). Our analyses also yielded some interesting results. Organizational justice has stronger effects in the accepting free gifts scenario compared to the theft from the crime scene scenario. The limited effect of organizational justice in the theft from the crime scene scenario can be explained by the fnding that the majority of the respondents are willing to report this type of misconduct.

We found no relationship between organizational justice and the respondents' willingness to report misconduct in the excessive force scenarios. While it is unclear why these two variables are unrelated, it can be argued that the effects of organizational justice may be masked by the politically sensitive nature of the police use of force in contemporary American society. Our results suggest a plausible interpretation that, in the present moment and historical context, organizational justice plays a secondary role in the excessive force scenarios.

Our multivariate analyses of the effects of organizational justice on respondents' own willingness to adhere to the code of silence in organizational deviance scenarios revealed an inconsistent relationship. While perceived organizational justice has a signifcant positive effect on the adherence to the code of silence in covering up a DUI crash scenario, it has a signifcant negative effect in the false overtime reporting scenario, and has no signifcant effect on the adherence to the code of silence in the false sick report scenario. Additional data are needed to explain why the relationship between the perceptions of organizational justice and respondents' decision to adhere to the code of silence varies so widely across organizational deviance scenarios.

Similarly, our multivariate analyses indicated that perceptions of organizational justice have inconsistent effects on the respondents' willingness to report misconduct in interpersonal deviance scenarios. While the effects of organizational justice on adherence to the code of silence are negative and insignifcant in telling sexist jokes and yelling at coworkers scenarios, they are positive and signifcant in the spreading false rumors about a coworker scenario. This fnding is unexpected because it would be reasonable to assume that offcers should be more likely to report false rumors about a colleague when they believe that organizational justice exists in their agency, which is not the case here. Because some omitted factors, those not included in our multivariate models, may also affect the adherence to the code of silence, this puzzle will remain unanswered without additional data asking about offcers' reasons for their decision.

Overall, our fndings provide insight into what we know about the body of research on the code of silence. Police administrators could beneft from studying the effects of organizational justice on the adherence to the code of silence, and could more effectively tailor their policies and create a workplace where perceptions of organizational justice are promoted and the support for misconduct is reduced. Our fndings also shed light on what we do not know and what needs to be examined in the future (e.g., the relationship between organizational justice and the respondents' decision to adhere to the code of silence across organizational deviance scenarios).

In the next chapter, we will examine the effects of self-legitimacy on police offcers' prosocial and antisocial behaviors. Specifcally, we will explore whether self-legitimacy can enhance the ability of the police integrity theory to explain offcers' adherence to the code of silence. First, we will provide the theoretical explanations of the relationship between willingness to adhere to the code of silence and self-legitimacy. Then, we will present and discuss the results of bivariate and multivariate analyses that explain the correlation between these two measures.

# **References**

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# **Chapter 5 The Code of Silence and Self-Legitimacy**

**Abstract** An emerging body of research suggests that the concept of self-legitimacy plays an important role in various outcomes associated with police offcer attitudes and behaviors. In this chapter, we extend this literature by looking at the potential role that self-legitimacy may play in explaining the code of silence. The results suggest that self-legitimacy exerts an inconsistent effect on police offcers' decisions to adhere to the code of silence across the scenarios. Moreover, adding self-legitimacy to the model does not substantively change the effect of the traditional police integrity variables. The chapter concludes with a discussion of theoretical and policy implications of these fndings.

**Keywords** Police integrity · Police misconduct · Self-legitimacy · Police legitimacy · Police offcers

# **Introduction**

One of the key concerns in policing in recent years has been the legitimacy of the police. Typically, scholarly discussions of the legitimacy of the police revolve around how legitimate the community sees the police, or the so-called audience legitimacy (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012). This strand follows from the work of Tyler (1990), which suggests that, when the public perceives an authority fgure as legitimate, they are more likely to comply with law and cooperate with legal authorities. Weber (1978) also pointed out that there are multiple reasons why a person may comply with the commands from an authority beyond perceiving the authority as legitimate (e.g., self-interest, affnity for the authority).

However, this theoretical model may be incomplete, as it neglects to consider the claims of legitimacy that are made by those who are in power, the so-called selflegitimacy (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012). The concept of self-legitimacy may play a role in enhancing the police integrity theory's ability to explain the offcers' decisions to adhere to the code of silence, although—to our knowledge—this link has yet to be directly tested.

Lapses in integrity can certainly serve to erode the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public; however, a lack of self-legitimacy could also lead to lapses in integrity. The argument is that the degree of self-legitimacy an offcer has, "…can serve to either promote or inhibit normatively desirable modes of policing" (Bradford & Quinton, 2014, p. 1023). In other words, the degree of self-legitimacy that an offcer has may be associated with more desirable outcomes, as demonstrated in the empirical literature (see Gau & Paoline, 2021).

In this chapter, we explore the nature of the relationship between the code of silence and the offcers' perceptions of their own power. In particular, we look at how offcers' self-legitimacy infuences their perceptions of (un)willingness to report misconduct. To do so, we use a two-step analytic process to estimate the effect of self-legitimacy on the code of silence. The frst step focuses on the bivariate relationship between the code of silence and self-legitimacy. The second step of the analyses deploys multivariate models to test the effect of self-legitimacy—in addition to the traditional police integrity variables—on police offcers' adherence to the code of silence.

# **Self-Legitimacy**

Starting with the seminal work of Tyler (1990), criminologists have become increasingly interested in the concept of legitimacy. The initial formulation of the legitimacy model suggested that, when an authority fgure is seen as legitimate by those over whom the power is exercised, they are more willing to voluntarily act in a manner that is consistent with what the authority fgure would want (Tyler, 2003). In the realm of criminal justice, those who see the criminal justice system and its actors as legitimate are more willing voluntarily to obey the law and cooperate with offcials. This is what is often called *audience legitimacy*.

Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) argue that, by only focusing on audience legitimacy, we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Specifcally, Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) suggest that legitimacy is a dialogue between the power holder and those over whom power is exerted. In other words, prior to considering the response from the audience, we must frst consider the claim made by the authorities. Importantly, not all claims to power are legitimate. Legitimacy requires that the authority makes a legitimate claim to power in the form of an order, which can also be accepted by the audience (i.e., the person not in power; Raz, 2009).

The argument is distilled to suggest that legitimacy is both *dialogic* and *relational* (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012). In short, legitimacy is predicated on a claim to a legitimate power made by an authority fgure and the response from those over whom authority is exercised. Two important implications follow from this observation. First, legitimacy is not a fxed property, but rather something that is continually being negotiated between the authority fgure and the audience. Second, as legitimacy is being constantly re-negotiated between the police and the public, the state of affairs also depends on how the police engaged in the re-negotiations and how

they are perceiving their own authority. Hence, we may be missing important theoretical explanations for the behavior of police offcers by omitting the self-legitimacy espoused by police offcers.

The concept of self-legitimacy becomes even more important when considering the consequences of a lack of legitimacy. For most citizens, the police are the most visible and recognizable manifestations of the government's authority (Punch, 2000). As such, the police are the group that society—through the government authorizes to use coercive means to bring people into behavioral compliance with societal expectations (Bittner, 1970). However, this is a proverbial double-edged sword. The less legitimate the public perceives the police to be, the more likely it becomes that the police will need to use coercive means to attain compliance (Muir, 1977). This increased use of coercion can then further erode the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public (Tyler, 1990). Some scholars have even gone so far as to argue that the need to use force is an indication that the authority has failed to make a legitimate claim in the eyes of the audience (Coicaud, 2002). In other words, offcers who need to use force may already lack self-legitimacy, which further exacerbates the problem, thus creating a feedback loop.

The issue is further aggravated by the complex nature of the police role. The very nature of the police role makes it nearly impossible for the police to not use some sort of coercion to accomplish their social mandate (Bittner, 1970). Therefore, the simplistic nature of the feedback loop described above may be too reductionist. Instead, scholars argue that offcers must learn to balance the complex moral mandate and the realities of their job (Muir, 1977). However, offcers who are unable successfully to reconcile the competing demands may exhibit troubling behaviors (Tankebe, 2014; Tankebe & Meško, 2015).

The concept of self-legitimacy is further complicated by theoretical and operational ambiguity. Specifcally, two theoretical arguments have been inconsistently tested in the criminological literature. The frst argument that is grounded is the dialogic approach between the authority and the audience delineated by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012). In a nutshell, police self-legitimacy is formed as part of a dialogue with the public. The second version is based on the work of Barker (2001), which suggests that the feedback from the audience is irrelevant in the formation of an authority fgures' self-legitimacy. As Bradford and Quinton (2014, p. 1028) argue, "police may gain legitimacy from the idea that they are different and apart from others in society…police have a legal duty, and are right, to enforce the law without 'fear or favor' irrespective of public approval." Essentially, the selflegitimacy of the police stems from the fact that offcers feel they are entitled and empowered to take appropriate actions on behalf of the police. Some scholars argue that Barker's (2001) version is inappropriate to apply to the police because of the direct interaction between the police and the public, which augments the importance of the concept of audience legitimacy (Jonathan-Zamir & Harpaz, 2014).

Prior empirical work has confated items that try to operationalize both theoretical approaches, which are based on two potentially conficting theoretical arguments (Gau & Paoline, 2021). First, it is more diffcult to determine what factors lead to self-legitimacy. These antecedents are largely important to ascertain which causal sequence of self-legitimacy is more appropriate. Second, the effects for the consequences of self-legitimacy are equally theoretically muddled. However, given the consistency in the research in this area (i.e., self-legitimacy exerts generally desirable effects), this may be less of a problem (see generally Gau and Paoline, 2021). Given the complexity of this issue and the focus of our book on another issue—the police code of silence—we make no attempt to refne the theoretical development of self-legitimacy. Instead, we focus our attention on how self-legitimacy may infuence offcers' decision to adhere to the code of silence.

# **Effects of Self-Legitimacy on Police Attitudes and Behavior**

Beyond the purely scholarly study of the theoretical nature of self-legitimacy, it is important to consider what the potential effects of self-legitimacy are on the attitudes and behaviors of police offcers. Research suggests that a person's identity (i.e., perception of self-legitimacy) will directly affect how they interpret and respond to situations (Archer, 2000). This observation led Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) to apply this approach to their study of police offcers, arguing that an offcer's self-legitimacy may infuence how they interpret, evaluate, and respond to various situations.

Given that the police are authorized to use coercive force against the public and that their application restricts citizens' freedoms, research has disproportionately focused on the use of force decisions. Some of the earliest research in this area examined the relationship between the self-legitimacy and attitudes regarding the use of force among police offcers in Ghana (Tankebe, 2014) and found no relationship between police offcers' self-legitimacy and their general attitudes toward the legitimate use of force. It is important to note that these represented offcers' global attitudes toward the use of force, which are notoriously problematic to measure because most participants impute information to respond to the question, which limits variability of responses (Roberts, 2003). Conversely, asking about specifc attitudes typically results in better measurements (Cann et al., 1980; Hollin & Howells, 1987). Subsequent research looking at the relationship between selflegitimacy and the use of force addressed the methodological limitations of relying on global attitudes. Notably, Tankebe and Meško (2015) found that, in a sample of Slovenian police offcers, self-legitimacy was associated with offcers being less supportive of using force to resolve a hypothetical scenario instead of relying on a verbal warning. Taken together, these results suggest that police offcers' selflegitimacy may be related to the tactics they are likely to employ when interacting with citizens.

A subsequent line of research suggests that self-legitimacy may also play an important role in the way offcers treat community members. In their analysis of data from a police agency in the United Kingdom, Bradford and Quinton (2014) found that offcers with higher self-legitimacy were more likely to espouse support for constitutional policing and preserving the rights of community members. These results imply that police offcers with higher levels of self-legitimacy are less supportive of various police tactics that violate citizens' rights. Further, these data showed that self-legitimacy also reduced offcers' support for the use of force against community members. The effect of self-legitimacy persisted even when controlling for offcers' perceptions of organizational justice. The magnitude of the effect of self-legitimacy was the strongest for the support for procedurally just policing and preserving the rights of community members (Bradford & Quinton, 2014; see also Wolfe & Nix, 2017). A similar effect was found in research on Israeli police offcers (Jonathan-Zamir & Harpaz, 2014).

The study of self-legitimacy has also been expanded to examine how selflegitimacy may insulate the police from deleterious media coverage in the wake of controversial police encounters with the public. In fact, Wolfe and Nix (2016) examined the role that self-legitimacy may play in explaining police offcers' support for engaging in community partnerships after considering the so-called Ferguson effect (i.e., police offcers' withdrawal from their offcial duties and responsibilities—to the extent possible—in response to the additional public scrutiny caused by widely publicized police killings and other police actions). The results from this study show that self-legitimacy mediated the Ferguson effect on offcers' willingness to engage in community partnerships. This fnding is particularly salient in light of simultaneous consideration of the Ferguson effect and selflegitimacy. The Ferguson effect represents an erosion—or at least strong questioning—of legitimacy of the police (i.e., audience legitimacy) caused by their publicized actions. The fact that self-legitimacy mediates this relationship is consistent with Barker's (2001) argument about the formation of self-legitimacy.

# **Self-Legitimacy and the Code of Silence**

Empirical evidence suggests the importance of self-legitimacy in predicting certain prosocial and antisocial behaviors of offcers (e.g., Bradford & Quinton, 2014; Jonathan-Zamir & Harpaz, 2014; Wolfe & Nix, 2017). At the same time, we found no empirical studies linking self-legitimacy and adherence to the code of silence. However, there are strong theoretical reasons to suppose that self-legitimacy may be associated with the (un)willingness to report colleagues' misconduct. To make the link between these two constructs, one must understand police integrity theory and the theoretical mechanisms that are posited to explain self-legitimacy.

There are four dimensions of the police integrity theory (Klockars et al., 2000, 2006). A more comprehensive description of the theory is presented in Chap. 1, so we outline an abbreviated version here. The frst dimension focuses on *organizational* rules and the degree to which police offcers understand and support the offcial rules (Klockars et al., 2000, 2006). The second dimension of the police integrity theory focuses on various *organizational control mechanisms* and emphasizes the police agency's internal disciplinary system (Klockars et al., 2000, 2006). The third dimension is the *cultural* dimension, which explores the respondents' (un)

willingness to report misconduct and their assessments of peers' willingness to do the same. The fourth dimension of the police integrity theory explores the infuence of the *larger social context* on police integrity, the dimension that has been the least tested of the four (Kutnjak Ivković, 2015; Maskàly et al., 2019).

The way the four dimensions of police integrity theory connect to self-legitimacy comes from the dialogic approach that offcers use to form self-legitimacy. Specifcally, Wolfe and Nix (2017) suggest that interactions with three groups of people are particularly important for self-legitimacy: supervisors, colleagues, and the public. These groups could be connected to the four dimensions identifed by the police integrity theory. Specifcally, the interactions with supervisors are part of the organizational rules and organizational control mechanism dimensions. Interaction with peers is akin to the cultural element posited by the police integrity theory. Finally, the conversation with the public that is key to Bottoms and Tankebe's (2012) model of self-legitimacy could be part and parcel of the larger social context in which the police operate—the fourth dimension of the police integrity theory.

There clearly is some conceptual overlap between the police integrity theory and self-legitimacy. One of the key arguments proffered by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) is that self-legitimacy is directly tied to the moral rectitude of the power vested in the authority. This suggests that, if offcers lacking self-legitimacy may also have a compromised moral compass, this faw may then affect their willingness to report their peers' rule-violating behavior (i.e., traditional police misconduct). Conversely, those with more self-legitimacy may have a moral compass that is so attuned to the larger goals of policing that an offcer may fail to report misconduct because it achieves a larger goal (i.e., noble cause corruption). However, scholars have argued that those with the greatest degree of self-legitimacy will not confate the means and the ends in their decision-making processes (Archer, 2000). In other words, an offcer who truly has self-legitimacy would still be willing to report a colleague who engaged in misconduct that was aimed at accomplishing some higher goal.

The police integrity theory and self-legitimacy are logically congruent. Agencies are trying to balance the competing concerns of deterring offcers' behavior with appropriately severe discipline without increasing offcers' feelings of organizational injustice (Fridell et al., 2021). Research fnds that self-legitimacy mediates the effect of organizational (in)justice (i.e., how organizational rules are implemented). In other words, self-legitimacy can serve as a protective factor in police agencies with a weak organizational inclination toward police integrity. Yet, we are unaware of any study that has directly tested the relationship between self-legitimacy and the theory of police integrity.

# **This Chapter**

Extant research indicates that self-legitimacy has the capacity to predict certain prosocial and antisocial behaviors of offcers. Yet, although there are strong theoretical reasons to assume that self-legitimacy and the (un)willingness to report colleagues' misconduct could be related, we found no empirical study linking self-legitimacy and the adherence to the code of silence. The purpose of this chapter is to fll the gap in the extant literature by determining whether self-legitimacy can enhance the ability of the police integrity theory to explain offcers' adherence to the code of silence (i.e., unwillingness to report). We expand the traditional police integrity literature by also considering the effect of self-legitimacy on the police offcers' adherence to the code of silence. Furthermore, we explore the relationship on a range of forms of police misconduct, from police corruption and the use of excessive force, to organizational and interpersonal deviance.

# **Methodology**

# *Sample*

In 2018/2019, we administered a survey to a sample of 148 police offcers from a medium-sized municipal police agency from the United States. For full characteristics of the sample and the data collection procedures, please see Chaps. 1 and 2.

# *Measures*

The analyses in this chapter examine the effects of self-legitimacy on the respondents' expressed (un)willingness to report misconduct. The measures of police integrity, which include the code of silence, came from the newest version of the police integrity questionnaire (Kutnjak Ivković et al., 2019) that includes 12 different scenarios that depict instances of police corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance. After being presented with the scenarios, participants were asked to respond to the same seven questions for each of the scenarios. Participants indicated their own perceptions of seriousness, how serious their colleagues would perceive the described action to be, whether the action was a violation of organizational rules, what the expected discipline would be, what they think the appropriate level of discipline should be, their own willingness to report the misconduct, and their peers' willingness to report the misconduct. For additional details, please see Chaps. 1 and 2.

#### **Dependent Variable**

The dependent variable for the analyses in this chapter is the respondents' *own expression of adherence to the code of silence* for misconduct depicted in each scenario. Initially, participants responded on a 5-point Likert scale, which ranged from 1 ("defnitely would not report") to 5 ("defnitely would report"). The code of silence variable was created by coding the responses from the offcers who expressed a general unwillingness to report the actions (i.e., 1 or 2 on the original scale) as a 1, and the responses from the offcers who expressed a general willingness to report (i.e., 3–5 on the original scale) as a 0.

#### **Organizational Independent Variables**

We have also included several organizational variables previously identifed by the police integrity theory research. These variables include the participants' *own perceptions of seriousness*, whether the conduct *violates organizational rules*, assessments of the *expected discipline* imposed by the police agency, and estimates of *most police offcers' willingness to report*. For a more detailed description, see Chaps. 1 and 2.

#### **Self-Legitimacy Independent Variables**

The questionnaire that was administered to the offcers contained several additional items, including two items that measured the concept of *self-legitimacy*. Because of the theoretical ambiguity of the construct described above, measurement of selflegitimacy has been inconsistent in the research (Gau & Paoline, 2021). To make the results more easily comparable to those of other studies, we used items from Wolfe and colleagues' (2018) study.

The specifc items and their descriptive statistics are presented in Table 5.1. For each of these items, respondents indicated their level of agreement using a traditional 5-point Likert scale. The items were subjected to principal axis factoring to look for evidence of internal validity. The results of the analysis show that both items load together on a single construct, both with high factor loading coeffcients (λ = 0.80; Table 5.1). Additionally, measures of internal consistency showed that the items have an acceptable degree of reliability (α = 0.84). Based on the evidence, we then estimated factor scores for the self-legitimacy factor. This self-legitimacy variable was then used in subsequent analyses.

**Table 5.1** Measurement properties of self-legitimacy items

# *Analytic Strategy*

As in prior chapters, the analyses proceed in two stages. In the frst stage of the analyses, we examine the bivariate relationship between the willingness to adhere to the code of silence and self-legitimacy for each of the 12 scenarios. These analyses are a series of point-biserial correlations between willingness to adhere to the code of silence and the self-legitimacy scores. The second stage of the analyses focuses, for each of the 12 scenarios, on the multivariate relationship between the willingness to adhere to the code of silence and self-legitimacy. Again, we employed the cross-folded LASSO technique for making out of sample inferences using the same controls as in prior chapters. For additional information on this technique, please see Chap. 2.

# **Results**

# *The Effects of Self-Legitimacy on the Code of Silence*

We frst analyzed the bivariate relationship between the willingness to report the misconduct and the latent measure of self-legitimacy. The results (Table 5.2) generally indicate that the relationship is negative and statistically signifcant. It is signifcant for all scenarios apart from the scenario of interpersonal deviance depicting an offcer spreading false rumors about a coworker. The average size of the correlation coeffcient for interpersonal deviance scenarios—like this one—is the strongest across the four types of misconduct. In fact, the average size of the correlation is the strongest for interpersonal deviance, followed by organizational deviance, then use of excessive force, while it is the weakest for corruption. In fact, the average correlation between self-legitimacy and the code of silence for the corruption scenarios is 24% less than for the interpersonal deviance scenarios.

There is a fair degree of heterogeneity in the effects for the scenarios *within* the four sub-types of misconduct (Table 5.2). A closer examination does not show a consistent pattern in the strength of these relationships. In other words, for example, we do not fnd systematic evidence that self-legitimacy exerts a stronger effect on the more serious scenarios within each subtype.

# *The Effects of Self-Legitimacy and Police Integrity on to the Code of Silence*

The results are shown in Table 5.3. Overall, the traditional police integrity variables do not substantively change with the inclusion of the self-legitimacy items. There are some minor differences in the results (i.e., changes in the magnitude of

**Table 5.2** Bi-variate relationship between self-legitimacy and the code of silence

*Note*: **\*** = *p* < 0.05

coeffcients) and a few changes in the substantive interpretation of the variables, most of which are attributed to the stabilized standard errors after the inclusion of the self-legitimacy measure. We comment briefy on the differences in the results presented in the unconditional models shown in Chap. 2.

#### **Police Corruption**

The frst set of models (Table 5.3) shows the multivariate results for the corruption scenarios. The results here indicate that self-legitimacy exerts an inconsistent effect on the willingness to adhere to the code of silence for the three corruption scenarios. In the scenario in which the offcer accepts gifts from members of the community, the effect of self-legitimacy is negative (OR = 0.75, *p* < 0.05), which is consistent with the bivariate relationship estimated above. However, for the other two scenarios, increased self-legitimacy is associated with a greater likelihood of adhering to the code of silence (i.e., being unwilling to report misconduct). It is unclear what could account for these differences, both of which are contrary to their respective bivariate relationships. Finally, the effect of self-legitimacy on the adherence to the code of silence is the strongest—marginally—for the most serious corruption scenario (i.e., theft from a burglary scene).

**Table 5.3** Self-legitimacy effects on the code of silence

*Notes*: \* = *p <* 0.05, \*\* = *p <* 0.01, \*\*\* = *p <* 0.001; − parameter excluded due to collinearity a Reference category is "intermediate discipline"

The results from the more traditional police integrity measures largely remain unchanged with the inclusion of these new variables, with the estimates of other police offcers' willingness to adhere to the code of silence being the strongest predictor of the police offcers' own adherence to the code. We see that the effects for all the variables for the scenario of accepting free gifts are only marginally attenuated compared to the unconditional models presented in Chap. 2. The same is largely true for the scenario depicting supervisory corruption as well. The key change for this scenario is that the own perceptions of seriousness, not signifcant in the unconditional model, become signifcant after the inclusion of self-legitimacy, which stabilized the standard errors for this variable in the updated model. In this model, the more serious police offcers evaluated the scenarios, the less likely they were to say that they would adhere to the code of silence.

The biggest differences are seen in regard to the other offcers' willingness to report the misconduct in the theft scenario and the supervisory errands scenario. There, the coeffcients for the type of discipline expected are slightly attenuated (as in the other scenarios), but the substantive conclusion remains unchanged. However, after including self-legitimacy in the model, the effect of other offcers' adhering to the code of silence is augmented by 41.8% for theft from a crime scene and 29.3% for the supervisory corruption scenario. These increases suggest that the inclusion of the self-legitimacy item may be explaining common variation with the measure of the respondent's peers' willingness to adhere to the code of silence.

#### **Use of Excessive Force**

Next, we turn to the results for the scenarios depicting the excessive use of force scenarios (Table 5.3). Again, the self-legitimacy measure performs inconsistently, this time across the excessive force scenarios. There is a strong positive effect of self-legitimacy on adherence to the code of silence for the scenario depicting an offcer shooting a suspect in the back (OR = 3.30, *p* < 0.05) and, to a lesser degree, for the scenario depicting verbal abuse of a citizen (OR = 1.24, *p* < 0.05). Both of these fndings contravene the theoretical expectations of self-legitimacy. However, the effect is theoretically consistent for the scenario depicting a failure to report a beating (OR = 0.74, *p* < 0.001).

The results for the traditional police integrity variables largely remain unchanged—substantively and in magnitude—across the three scenarios, with the exception of others' willingness to report. The magnitude of these coeffcients here is larger for each of the three excessive force scenarios than it is in the unconditional models presented in Chap. 2. In fact, after including self-legitimacy, the effect of peers' adherence to the code of silence is strengthened by 31.7% compared to the unconditional model. Similarly, the effect is augmented by 20.4% for the scenario of failing to stop a beating and 9.8% for the verbal abuse of a citizen. Again, this would suggest that the inclusion of self-legitimacy into these models largely adds unique explanatory power to the model, although there is a pattern developing in the self-legitimacy item for these excessive force scenarios—and those with corruption: offcers' perceptions of their peers' willingness to report seems to be related to their level of self-legitimacy. Given that conversations—and relationships—with peers is theoretically one of the accomplishments offcers need to have to establish selflegitimacy (Wolfe & Nix, 2017), this is not entirely surprising.

#### **Organizational Deviance**

Next, we turn to the multivariate results for the organizational deviance scenarios (Table 5.3). For these scenarios, self-legitimacy performs more consistently across scenarios. In fact, self-legitimacy exerts the same magnitude of effect for covering up a DUI crash of a fellow offcer and for false overtime reporting (OR = 0.73, *p* < 0.001). However, there is no signifcant effect for the scenario depicting an offcer calling in sick to work. Indeed, self-legitimacy exerts an effect for the two more serious scenarios, but not the least serious of the three.

The effects from the traditional police integrity variables remain substantively unchanged with the inclusion of self-legitimacy. Thus, while self-legitimacy may be associated with the willingness to report misconduct in some instances of organizational deviance, the effect here is unique to those exerted by the other police integrity variables. The unique nature of self-legitimacy in these organizational deviance scenarios is distinct from those of police integrity variables, suggesting that selflegitimacy may infuence offcers' decision-making processes differently based on the type of misconduct that is encountered. The organization—or at least supervisors—has been identifed as a key partner in the dialogue to develop self-legitimacy (Wolfe & Nix, 2017). The results here may suggest that offcers' dialogue with the organization in the formation of self-legitimacy is seen as different for instances of misconduct against the organization relative to those outside the organization—as is the case in most of the corruption and excessive force scenarios.

#### **Interpersonal Deviance**

Finally, we look at the effect of self-legitimacy on interpersonal deviance (Table 5.3). Self-legitimacy only exerts a signifcant negative effect on the scenario in which an offcer rudely yells at his/her coworkers for a perceived slight (OR = 0.44, *p* < 0.001) and does not exert a signifcant effect on the other two interpersonal deviance scenarios. Unlike other types of scenarios which show a trend in the effect but are not statistically signifcant (largely because of the size of the standard errors), this is not the case with the other two interpersonal deviance scenarios. In fact, the effects here are substantively null.

Furthermore, we see that the results associated with the traditional police integrity measures again largely remain unchanged. For example, the effects for the police integrity variables are almost identical for the telling sexist jokes scenario and the scenario involving spreading false rumors about coworkers. There are a few differences for the scenario depicting the offcer rudely yelling at his/her coworkers. The only exception to this trend is again seen in the effect of other offcers' adherence to the code of silence for the yelling at coworkers scenario, where the effect is augmented by 98.9% compared to the unconditional model presented in Chap. 2. This is the only scenario in which self-legitimacy exerts a signifcant effect. Therefore, it is not entirely surprising that this effect changes consistently with prior scenarios in which self-legitimacy exerts a signifcant effect. Again, this fnding is

suggesting that the conversations with peers may indeed be an important component in the formation of self-legitimacy—or vice versa.

# **Conclusion**

In this chapter, we have added a scale of self-legitimacy to the multivariate model of the code of silence. As it turns out, the addition of self-legitimacy measures left the traditional police integrity variables largely unchanged, except for magnifying the effect of others' willingness to report.

The results from this set of analyses show a complicated relationship between the code of silence and self-legitimacy. For three scenarios, the relationship is positive and signifcant (i.e., self-legitimacy *increases* the adherence to the code of silence), in fve scenarios it is negative and signifcant (i.e., self-legitimacy *decreases* the adherence to the code of silence), and in the remaining four there is a null effect (i.e., self-legitimacy is *not related* to the code of silence).

To further tease out the nature of this complex relationship between the code of silence and self-legitimacy, we looked at systematic patterns across the scenarios. There does not seem to be an apparent relationship between the type of misconduct depicted in the scenario (i.e., corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance) and the nature of the effect that self-legitimacy has on the code of silence (i.e., positive or negative). Similarly, self-legitimacy is not related in any systematic way to the seriousness of misconduct protected by the code.

We have also tried to assess whether the nature of the questions we asked about self-legitimacy was related to our results. Extant literature has developed two distinct theoretical causal frameworks for the development of self-legitimacy. The frst theoretical framework involves the dialogic approach outlined by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012), whereby self-legitimacy is a conversation that offcers have with various constituencies in the development of their self-legitimacy. Following this approach, self-legitimacy is highly dependent upon the feedback from others, be they supervisors, peers, or community members. The second theoretical framework, proposed by Barker (2001), suggests that self-legitimacy is unilaterally determined by the offcer's feelings and sentiments and is not infuenced by how the police offcer is perceived by others. These two theoretical models have led to a bifurcation in the literature about how self-legitimacy should be measured and captured, with some research identifying different antecedents of each of these forms of selflegitimacy (Gau & Paoline, 2021).

The measure of self-legitimacy that we used in this study was comprised of only two items, one of which (i.e., "I understand how my work directly contributes to the success of my agency") tapped the dimension specifed by the dialogic approach specifed by Bottoms and Tankebe (2012), while the other (i.e., "I have confdence in the authority vested in me as a police offcer") is more consistent with Barker's (2001) approach. The nature of the questions asked to measure self-legitimacy makes it diffcult to disentangle the theoretical puzzle surrounding self-legitimacy in our study. In unreported sensitivity analyses, we examined the independent effect of each of these two variables measuring self-legitimacy on the code of silence. As it turns out, the results were substantively unchanged. In other words, while the magnitude of the effects was different across these two variables, the substantive conclusions (i.e., self-legitimacy increases or decreases adherence to the code of silence) were the same. This suggests that, while it remains important to resolve the theoretical ambiguity surrounding the development of self-legitimacy, resolving it would not make the interpretation of the results easier in this study.

The fact that the results from this study are somewhat inconsistent with the emerging body of literature may have also stem from organizational differences. Research consistently points to the fact that police agencies vary in terms of their culture (Cordner, 2017) and their level of integrity (Klockars et al., 2000, 2006). These differences are often driven by different organizational emphases and policies, both of which could affect the operationalization of self-legitimacy. Specifcally, offcers in the agencies that put more emphasis on constitutional policing and police integrity could have different perceptions of what self-legitimacy is than the police offcers from agencies focused on more aggressive and questionable tactics of crime control. On the one hand, for police offcers from police agencies of high integrity, the concept of self-legitimacy could rely on the view that their role is to serve the community and engage in a dialogue with the community about how policing should be done. On the other hand, for police offcers from the police agencies willing to engage in more aggressive and questionable tactics, the concept of selflegitimacy could incorporate the view that their role is very traditional, focused primarily on aggressive law enforcement.

While these are theoretical possibilities—including a full range of other views of self-legitimacy between these two extremes—there is nothing that we can specifcally articulate about the agency from which these data were collected that may shine a light on this differentiation. However, the agency that participated in our study is not known as being particularly progressive or innovative (i.e., actively reinforcing the importance of constitutional policing) nor is it known for being particularly regressive in any domain (i.e., consistently failing to control police misconduct). Instead, this agency is more akin to a typical police agency in the United States.

The importance of this characterization comes into play when considering the other police agencies included in extant self-legitimacy research. Policing scholars have consistently identifed a "big city bias" in the study of policing, suggesting that the largest police agencies in the United States are both routinely more progressive and more likely to be studied (Falcone et al., 2002). Furthermore, research suggests that many police departments refuse to participate in the research concerning topics considered to be particularly sensitive (Archbold & Maguire, 2002). Taken together, this may suggest that prior self-legitimacy research may have been conducted in large agencies that were more willing to participate in research and were more progressive than the mid-size agency that agreed to participate in our study. It is diffcult to confrm our speculation because many police agencies that participate in research are anonymized—as is our agency—as a condition of their participation.

The implication is that, perhaps, the defnition of self-legitimacy utilized by police offcers from the agencies that agreed to participate in prior research could be quite different from the defnition of self-legitimacy used by police offcers in the agency that agreed to participate in our study. This would suggest that, while selflegitimacy may indeed be an important factor in the decision-making process and formation of offcers' attitudes, what it means to have self-legitimacy may be understood differently by police offcers from different agencies. This is a key question for subsequent research that focuses on self-legitimacy, especially studies linking self-legitimacy and police integrity research.

In our next, at the same time fnal chapter, we continue our exploration of the factors that affect the police offcers' code of silence. We argue that, to detect the full effect of each factor, such exploration should incorporate these different types of factors simultaneously. After presenting the theoretical arguments for the connections between these factors, we present the results from the full models that seek to explain police offcers' decision to adhere to the code of silence using the traditional police integrity variables, perceptions of disciplinary fairness, organizational justice, and self-legitimacy.

# **References**

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# **Chapter 6 Lessons Learned About the Code of Silence**

**Abstract** This chapter discusses the fndings of a case study of a mid-size U.S. police agency in the context of extant research and elaborates on the lessons learned from our study. Based on the empirical study of the contours of the code of silence across behaviors that violate tenets of police integrity, including police corruption, use of excessive force, interpersonal deviance, and organizational deviance, the chapter illustrates the interconnectedness between the code of silence and the police agency's organizational perspectives. The study emphasizes the role that the police offcers' organizational attitudes play in their willingness to adhere to the code of silence, from their perceptions of how willing other police offcers are to report misconduct and the severity of the disciplinary threat that their police agency is making, to their perceptions of self-legitimacy and organizational justice. The chapter concludes the book by offering a discussion of theoretical and policy implications of the fndings.

**Keywords** Police integrity · Organizational justice · Distributive fairness · Self-legitimacy · Code of silence

# **Introduction**

The code of silence has been a topic of scholarly work since the 1970s (e.g., Bittner, 1970; Klockars et al., 2000, 2004, 2006; Westley, 1970). Since the 1990s, the theory of police integrity and the related methodology have been used to measure empirically the contours of the code of silence across the world (for an overview, see Kutnjak Ivković, 2015; see also Klockars et al., 2004; Kutnjak Ivković & Haberfeld, 2015, 2019). Extant research on police integrity has established that police integrity measures, such as perceptions of misconduct seriousness, views about expected discipline, and the anticipated peers' willingness to report misconduct, are strongly related to the police offcers' (un)willingness to stick to the code of silence (see

Chap. 2). We have also demonstrated that the perceptions of disciplinary fairness seem to affect the respondents' determination whether to report misconduct (see Chap. 3). In further extension of police integrity work, we have incorporated measures of organizational justice (see Chap. 4) and self-legitimacy (see Chap. 5) to assess their relationship with the code of silence, while controlling for the police integrity measures. Up to this point, we have not yet combined these different approaches to obtain a full model of factors that affect the code of silence. Such an approach would allow us to evaluate the complexity of the ways in which these factors relate to the code of silence and to assess their individual strength in this multivariate space.

During multivariate statistics courses, most students are repeatedly told some form of the adage that "we do live in a multivariate world." This comment is meant to imbue future analysts with the belief that there is often more than a singular explanation for the same behavior, especially in the social sciences. After all, human behavior is thought to be infnitely complex. However, this realization—and analytic consequences—of this adage must be weighed against the competing concern for parsimonious theoretical explanations. In fact, students are often taught that parsimony is one of the criteria under which a criminological explanation can be judged (Akers & Sellers, 2013). This means that in our quest to explain any phenomenon and develop theoretical models, we must balance the competing concerns of completeness and parsimony.

Essentially, scholars are trying to balance these competing concerns. Neglecting important variables in a theoretical explanation may be inadvertently causing two problems. First, by ignoring key variables from the model we may end up identifying a spurious relationship between two variables that are in fact caused by another common factor, which is often excluded from the model (Weisburd et al., 2016). This error has at least two consequences. For scholars, this may lead to unnecessarily squandered research efforts to identify theoretical explanations of behavior. For practitioners, it could result in the wrong factors being manipulated to control the behavior in question. In other words, as it relates to the topic of this book, such an approach could result in policing scholars focusing on inappropriate factors to explain why offcers adhere to the code of silence and can lead police executives to manipulate the wrong factors to control this behavior. Both outcomes are deeply problematic for police integrity research, which is diffcult enough to begin with (e.g., Klockars et al., 2004; 2006).

The second problem associated with trying to balance the multivariate world and the parsimonious theoretical explanations is related to the concept of omitted variable bias. The problem of omitted variable bias, an issue frequently neglected in much of the criminological research (Weisburd et al., 2016), speaks to the fact that omitting an important explanatory variable from a regression model may yield problematic parameter estimates (Weisburd, 2010). Specifcally, if a key variable that is correlated with the dependent variable (i.e., adhering to the code of silence) is omitted from the model, it could make the results of the entire model highly questionable, especially when correlated with another independent variable in the model (Angrist and Pischke, 2008). Failing to include the appropriate variables in our theoretical explanations of social behavior can be deeply problematic.

In short, this means that our explanations of the factors affecting the code of silence explored in this book *so far* may have been incomplete. Our primary argument here is that, while police integrity theory, which has been rigorously and robustly tested (Klockars et al., 2006; Maskàly et al., 2019), offers one type of explanation for the offcer's decision to adhere to the code of silence, the theoretical argument could potentially be furthered with the inclusion of other factors. In prior chapters, we have looked at perceptions of disciplinary fairness (Chap. 3), organizational justice (Chap. 4), and self-legitimacy (Chap. 5) and their link with the police offces' adherence to the code of silence. However, each of these factors was independently added to the traditional police integrity variables in prior chapters and, as the discussion on omitted variable bias above suggests, the results from prior models may present an incomplete explanation of an offcer's decision to adhere to the code of silence. This is an especially pressing concern given the potentially strong theoretical and empirical relationships between the factors that were independently added in prior chapters.

In this chapter, we briefy explain the links between these additional theoretical concepts (i.e., discipline fairness, organizational justice, self-legitimacy) and the traditional police integrity measures (i.e., perceptions of policy violation, other police offcers' willingness to report, and perceptions of seriousness). We start by drawing together the traditions of disciplinary fairness and organizational justice. We continue by connecting the theoretical link between organizational justice and self-legitimacy. While the concepts of disciplinary fairness and self-legitimacy are almost certainly related, given that disciplinary fairness falls under the umbrella of organizational justice, to our knowledge the link has never been expressly tested nor theoretical linkages previously established. After presenting the theoretical arguments for the connections, we present the results from the full models that attempt to explain police offcers' decision to adhere to the code of silence using the traditional police integrity variables, perceptions of disciplinary fairness, organizational justice, and self-legitimacy.

# **Disciplinary Fairness and Organizational Justice**

One of the recurrent arguments in philosophy and social scientifc literature revolves around the related concepts of fairness and justice, which tend to be indiscriminately used interchangeably (Colquitt et al., 2005). Humans living in social settings have long been overly concerned about being treated fairly by other members in the social group. Furthermore, this idea of fair treatment has several subdomains, which are frequently encapsulated under the larger umbrella of organizational justice, comprised of distributive, procedural, and interpersonal justice (Greenberg, 1987).

The frst type of justice was distributive justice, which can be traced back to the writings of ancient Greek philosophers (e.g., Plato). The primary argument of distributive justice is that people are concerned with the fairness of various types of outcomes (Adams, 1963). Initially, much of the work in this area emphasized that individuals are concerned about receiving their fair share of outcomes, rewards, and promotions. There have been many iterations of distributive justice theories, but one of the common elements is that perceptions of distributive justice are not as much predicated on the absolute level of the outcome as they are on the relative comparisons to what is known about the outcomes that others in the same social group are receiving (Festinger, 1954).

Initial conceptualizations of distributive justice focused on the distribution of rewards, but research soon recognized that punishments—or discipline—generate the same pattern of concerns (Colquitt et al., 2005). Essentially, people may be willing to accept punishment for engaging in certain types of behavior, although they want to make sure that the distribution of this punishment is fair. There are three potential concerns: equity, equality, and need (Deutsch, 1975). The concept of *equity* is based on the initial construction of distributive justice, that a person receives a fair outcome based on their contribution (Adams, 1963, 1965). The concept of *equality* focuses on the fact that all people who do the same thing will receive the same distribution (Deutsch, 1985). This is akin to the concept of proportionality in criminal punishments, whereby all similarly situated defendants will be punished in the same way for the same crime (Feeley, 1978). The fnal concept *need—*is the least developed of three concepts. It focuses on what sorts of aggravating and mitigating factors a person may have that affect his/her distribution (Lerner, 1977). Determining which of these specifc motivations is present in the current data is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, we use this to highlight the link between organizational justice and disciplinary fairness.

Obviously, there is a direct link between organizational justice and discipline fairness through the lens of distributive justice, but the theoretical links between these two concepts do not stop there. Instead, the issue is more nuanced when looking at the literature on effective discipline in organizations, which suggests that the amount of discipline administered may be an important factor for the way employees feel about their organizations (Arvey & Ivancevich, 1980). If the discipline is too harsh, it may have unintended consequences because members of the organization become afraid of the discipline, rather than seeing discipline as a tool to enhance learning (Parke, 1972). Furthermore, employees are concerned that the organization consistently disciplines all employees for the same behaviors (Gary, 1971), which, in turn, enhances the effectiveness of discipline. The same effect is seen for individual managers consistently disciplining their subordinates (Rosen and Jardee, 1974). Finally, we see that employees tend to be concerned with the fact that all managers will issue the same type of discipline for the same types of behaviors to their subordinates (Walster and Walster, 1975). Each of these concerns can be lumped together under the umbrella of distributive justice, as each of them represents employee concerns that the discipline refects equity and equality. There are also concerns of need that have been identifed in the literature, although the implications and consequences are not nearly as feshed out in the extant empirical research.

Additionally, research suggests the nature of the relationship to the person administering the punishment/discipline is also an important factor in determining how effective punishment/discipline can be. Specifcally, discipline tends to be best received when there is a relatively close relationship between the person administering the discipline and the person being disciplined (Parke, 1972). Essentially, this type of situation leads the person who made the mistake to feel the discipline more acutely because of the positive relationship with the person delving out the discipline. This speaks to the concept of interactional justice within organizations, whereby the disciplined person is more likely to feel that they were treated with dignity and respect while being disciplined (Greenberg, 2009).

Finally, the process through which discipline is meted out also has important effects. Specifcally, research suggests that conveying trustworthy motives in the form of a rationale for the punishment is particularly effective in enhancing the effcacy and perceived fairness of punishment (Parke, 1972). This is particularly true when there is a substantial gap in time between the behavior and the discipline (Aronfreed, 1965). This concept can easily be applied to policing, given the oftensubstantial amount of time that it takes to conduct internal investigations related to lapses in police integrity. Again, the procedure in which the rationale for punishment is clearly outlined demonstrates to the employee being punished that the punishment is being implemented for trustworthy reasons. This is a key element of procedural justice, the fnal subcomponent of organizational justice.

# **Organizational Justice and Self-Legitimacy**

The theoretical relationship between organizational justice and self-legitimacy has been feshed out relatively recently. Bradford and Quinton (2014, p. 1023) succinctly identify the nature of the relationship by stating, "…organizational confgurations offcers' sense of their place in their organization and the relationships they have with both it and external stakeholders—can serve to promote or inhibit normative modes of policing." Self-legitimacy is a concern in policing because of the dialogic conversation between power holders and those over whom they exert their power (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012). An offcer's sense of self-legitimacy is important because it has been shown to explain differences in offcer behavior and attitudes (e.g., Bradford & Quinton, 2014; Tankebe & Meško, 2015). Therefore, self-legitimacy may play an important role in explaining police integrity (see Chap. 5).

Relatively little is known about how self-legitimacy is developed. Tankebe (2014, p. 5) stated that "direct interactions with others provide information about confdence in self-legitimacy," but did not defne who precisely the others are. Nix and Wolfe (2017) suggest that these conversations may be conducted with at least three primary groups: supervisors, colleagues, and the public. Our interest here revolves around the effects of those conversations that offcers are having with their supervisors, specifcally the organizationally just nature of those conversations. The theoretical argument suggests that offcers' self-legitimacy may be eroded or otherwise inhibited from forming in organizations that lack organizational justice.

The theoretical antecedents to self-legitimacy have been sparsely tested, although the limited evidence suggests organizational justice—and its components—are generally positively associated with self-legitimacy. For example, Nix and Wolfe (2017) found that perceptions of organizational justice are positively associated with self-legitimacy, even after considering the effects of negative publicity. This implies that, while certain types of negative publicity can certainly erode the selflegitimacy of offcers, this effect can be relatively easily overcome by enhancing the perceptions of organizational justice within the organization. Moreto et al. (2021) found a similar effect for conservation rangers' feelings of self-legitimacy. Moreover, Meško et al. (2017) also found that tenets of organizational justice affect the selflegitimacy of prison offcers in Slovenia, where perceptions of self-legitimacy were associated with better treatment of inmates. This emerging body of literature suggests that organizational justice plays a role in shaping police offcers' selflegitimacy, although no scholarship of which we are aware directly links self-legitimacy and organizational justice to police integrity.

When considering the relationship between organizational justice and selflegitimacy, an open question revolves around the theoretical specifcation and operationalization of these concepts. There seems to be measurement ambiguity associated with both organizational justice and self-legitimacy, but for different reasons. The trouble with organizational justice stems from the potential theoretical redundancy of organizational justice with other measures, namely organizational commitment. Some scholars argue that the relationship between organizational justice and other factors is mediated by organizational commitment (Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001). This may suggest that the effects ascribed to organizational justice may, in fact, truly belong to organizational commitment. Bradford and Quinton (2014) found that organizational identity—an analogous indicator to organizational commitment—mediated the relationship between procedurally fair treatment from supervisors and self-legitimacy. Research shows that the effect of organizational justice and a measure of police integrity (i.e., perceptions of seriousness) were partially mediated by organizational commitment (Fridell et al., 2021).

The second open theoretical and methodological problem revolves around the ambiguous theoretical operationalization of self-legitimacy. As Gau and Paoline (2020) point out, there have been two distinct discussions on the role of selflegitimacy: one that is inwardly focused and the other that involves public perceptions. The inward-focused theoretical notion of self-legitimacy puts the focus on the holder's assessment of their legitimacy, regardless of other factors (Barker, 2001). Conversely, the externally focused theoretical notion of self-legitimacy says that an offcer's claim of self-legitimacy involves an ongoing dialogue with the public (Tankebe, 2010). This distinction is important because, as Gau and Paoline (2020) show, measures of organizational justice exert differential effects. Notably, the scholars include two pseudo-measures of organizational justice analogous to organizational justice measures that are targeted at the offcer's direct supervisors and the organization's top management. The results from Gau and Paoline's study (2020) show that offcers' self-legitimacy is positively related, although not signifcantly, to supervisory support, and negatively and signifcantly related to top management support, whereas the opposite effects, although with the same signifcance interpretation, are observed for externally generated self-legitimacy. Furthermore, there was no signifcant bivariate relationship between the two measures of selflegitimacy. Taken as a whole, this would suggest that the relationship between organizational justice and self-legitimacy—if any—may be highly dependent upon the operational defnition of self-legitimacy and the operational defnition of organizational justice.

# **Disciplinary Fairness and Self-Legitimacy**

The link between disciplinary fairness and self-legitimacy is arguably the most theoretically underdeveloped among the independent variables in this book. However, there are at least two reasons to suspect that there might be a theoretical relationship between these two concepts. The frst is the transitive property of logic. This property states that, if A → B and B → C, then A → C. Thus, as shown above, because disciplinary fairness is related to organizational justice and organizational justice is related to self-legitimacy, it follows that self-legitimacy should also be related to disciplinary fairness. At the same time, the extant literature does not provide enough evidence to perform a robust literature review on the topic. Instead, we offer some early evidence that seeks preliminarily to tie these two constructs together.

We argue that the link between self-legitimacy and disciplinary fairness can be found by examining the operational defnitions of each. Another defnition of selflegitimacy is "power-holders' recognition of, or confdence in, their own individual entitlement to power" (Tankebe, 2014, p. 3). Some scholars argue that offcers with a higher degree of self-legitimacy are better able to perform their duties because they do not fear being unfairly disciplined for their actions (Nix and Wolfe, 2017), which is the key for linking this concept with disciplinary fairness.

Research fnds that overly harsh punishments can have a paralyzing effect on the decision-making and learning of employees in organizations (Parke, 1972). This would suggest that, when police organizations harshly discipline offcers who make mistakes, there may be an unintended consequence in the form of eroding offcers' self-legitimacy such that they no longer have confdence in the power bestowed upon them. Conversely, other research suggests that, when discipline is too lenient, this can also have deleterious effects because such discipline likely fails to change or stop the adverse behaviors (Weinstein, 1969). This failure to change behaviors and attitudes could then expose the disciplined offcers to adverse treatment by their peers. An offcer's peers represent one of the three constituencies with whom the offcer engages in the dialogic conversation to build self-legitimacy. Therefore, discipline that is too harsh may lead to the offcers' erosion of self-legitimacy because the offcers feel that they are unqualifed/incapable of holding the power vested in them. On the other hand, discipline that is too lenient may lead to the offcer's peers questioning the offcer's legitimacy as a police offcer. Therefore, there is indeed a relationship between self-legitimacy and disciplinary fairness, although the precise connection could use additional theoretical refnement and empirical assessment.

# **This Chapter**

Police integrity theory has a storied and consistent ability to explain adherence to the code of silence around the world. In this chapter, we seek to determine whether the inclusion of several theoretically relevant factors adds explanatory power to the traditional police integrity variables. Specifcally, we investigate whether simultaneous addition of measures of disciplinary fairness, organizational justice, and selflegitimacy changes our ability to predict police offcers' adherence to the code of silence in the scenarios depicting instances of various types of misconduct. Since each of these other constructs—especially organizational justice and selflegitimacy—have been used by policing scholars previously, they have proven to be quite successful in explaining various facets of police offcers' attitudes and behaviors, but there were no direct tests of their effectiveness in explaining police integrity. In prior chapters, we have seen how each of these factors operates independently when added to the traditional police integrity variables. Given the strong theoretical links between each of these additional constructs, it is possible that failing to include all of them in the same model may lead to omitted variable bias.

# **Methodology**

# *Sample*

In late 2018/2019, we surveyed police offcers from a medium-sized municipal police agency in the United States. The sample consists of 148 offcers that serve as sworn police offcers in this agency. For a more detailed description of the sampling method and sample characteristics, please see Chaps. 1 and 2.

# *Measures*

As with previous chapters, we are interested in explaining police offcers' decisions to adhere to the code of silence using traditional police integrity variables and the other independent variables described in previous chapters (Chaps. 3, 4, and 5). All measures were included in the newest version of the police integrity questionnaire designed by Kutnjak Ivkovicć and colleagues (2019). The central focus of the police integrity questionnaire are 12 scenarios depicting four categories of police misconduct: police corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance—each represented by three scenarios (see Chap. 2). For more details, please see Chaps. 1 and 2.

# **Dependent Variable**

Our measure of the respondents' adherence to the code of silence is based on their *own willingness to report* misconduct described in each scenario. Respondents were asked to indicate their willingness to report the behavior using a 5-point Likert scale that ranged from 1 (defnitely would not report) to 5 (defnitely would report). Given that we are interested in adherence to the code of silence (i.e., unwillingness to report), we collapsed the answers into two categories, with values of 1 and 2 coded as 1 (i.e., adhere to the code of silence) and the remaining values coded as 0. There are two exceptions to this rule for two of the most serious scenarios (i.e., theft from a burglary scene and shooting a suspect in the back), where reporting was much more ubiquitous than for other scenarios. In these cases, we assigned a value of 1 to those who initially indicated 1 through 3 on the initial Likert scale, with the other two values (4 and 5) coded as 0. For additional details, please see Chap. 2.

## **Organizational Independent Variables**

We incorporated several traditional police integrity variables into multivariate models. They include police offcers' own *estimates of misconduct seriousness*, their evaluations of misconduct as a *violation of offcial rules*, their views about what the *appropriate discipline* is and what the *expected discipline* would be, and their estimates of how willing *other police offcers* in their agency would be *to report misconduct*. For details, please see Chap. 2.

## **Disciplinary Fairness Independent Variables**

In addition to the above variables, we have included a measure of *disciplinary fairness*. For details, please see Chap. 3.

## **Organizational Justice Independent Variables**

The multivariate models of the respondents' adherence to the code of silence include the global measure of *organizational justice*. For details, please see Chap. 4.

## **Self-Legitimacy Independent Variables1**

The models that we have developed incorporate two measures of *self-legitimacy*. The results of the factor analysis showed that they are loading together as a simple construct of self-legitimacy. For details, please see Chap. 5.

<sup>1</sup>The results here indicate that there is a strong positive correlation between organizational justice and self-legitimacy (ρ = 0.71, *p* < 0.05), consistent with the theoretical linkage. Alternative analy-

#### **Individual Independent Variables**

The models also include several measures of the respondents' demographic characteristics: *length of service, gender, assignment, supervisory status,* and *education*. We utilize these demographic characteristics as the control variables. For details, please see Chap. 2.

# *Analytic Strategy*

The analyses build on the multivariate models of the code of silence presented in prior chapters. We predict adherence to the code of silence for all 12 scenarios using the traditional police integrity variables, the measure of disciplinary fairness, the measure of organizational justice, and the measure of self-legitimacy. We group together the results by misconduct type (i.e., corruption, use of excessive force, organizational deviance, and interpersonal deviance). Again, we continue to use the LASSO modeling procedure to estimate the multivariate effects, net of the control variables. For details, please see Chap. 2.

# **Results**

# *The Effects of Police Integrity, Distributive Fairness, Organizational Justice, and Self-Legitimacy on the Code of Silence*

#### **Police Corruption**

After including all independent variables in the model (Table 6.1), we see that the effects of the traditional police integrity measures (e.g., others' adherence to the code of silence, violation of agency rules, perceptions of seriousness) are largely consistent with the results from prior research. In all scenarios, offcers who feel their colleagues are unlikely to report the misconduct are also more likely to say that they would adhere to the code of silence. Additionally, knowledge of organizational rules (violation of policy) and perceptions of seriousness are both negatively associated with adherence to the code of silence, again consistent with prior research.

ses using the general linear model were employed to look for potential multicollinearity issues for the organizational justice and self-legitimacy measures. These analyses showed that the variance infation factor (VIF) value was less than 2.5 for each for each model. Across all 12 scenarios the average VIF for organizational justice was 2.44 and for self-legitimacy was 2.31. All of this suggests that, while the two constructs are highly correlated, including both in the same model does not appear to lead to problematic collinearity (Thompson et al., 2017).

Furthermore, compared to the respondents who expected some intermediate discipline, the respondents who expected no discipline tended to be more likely to say that they would not report (Table 6.1). Finally, compared to the respondents who expected intermediate discipline, the respondents who expected dismissal were more likely to say that they would adhere to the code of silence in two out of three scenarios than the respondents who expected intermediate discipline (Table 6.1).

Comparing the results of the traditional police integrity variables to those from the unconditional models estimated in Chap. 2, the results are substantively the same. Some of the effect sizes were attenuated by the inclusion of all the independent variables in the model, although some of the effects strengthened, especially in the scenario depicting supervisory corruption. Overall, these results suggest that the addition of these new variables is not redundant with the traditional police integrity variables and that they enhance the explanation of the police offcers' adherence to the code of silence.

The effects of disciplinary fairness remain substantively the same as they did in Chap. 3. However, the inclusion of the additional independent variables leads to harsh discipline—relative to a fair discipline—being statistically signifcant for the scenario of accepting free gifts (OR = 0.49, *p* < 0.01), unlike the models estimated in Chap. 3. The same pattern is observed for the same variable in the supervisory corruption scenario (OR = 0.45, *p* < 0.01). This would suggest that, while disciplinary fairness may be theoretically related to organizational justice—especially the distributive justice subcomponent—this construct offers a unique addition to our ability to explain adherence to the code of silence.

A very different pattern is seen for organizational justice in these corruption scenarios. After including the other independent variables, we see that organizational justice signifcantly reduces the likelihood that offcers would adhere to the code of silence in each of these three scenarios. These results are similar to the results from Chap. 4, although the effects are now signifcant for all scenarios. This consistent organizational justice effect is in accordance with theoretical expectations and prior research.

Finally, the results for self-legitimacy universally show that offcers who have a higher sense of self-legitimacy are more likely to adhere to the code of silence in these corruption scenarios, net of all of the other factors. This is consistent with the results from the unconditional models of self-legitimacy presented in Chap. 5. However, compared to the results reported in Chap. 5, the effects in current models have been substantially strengthened for two of the scenarios (i.e., theft from a burglary scene and supervisory corruption) and reversed for the scenario depicting an offcer accepting free gifts. Given the strength of the relationship between selflegitimacy and the other independent variables, such a stark change in the effect size is not surprising. This is the embodiment of the problems associated with omitted variable bias. These results challenge the emerging lore surrounding the importance of offcers developing self-legitimacy.

**Table 6.1** Full model estimates of adherence to the code of silence

*w*: \* = *p <* 0.05, \*\* = *p <* 0.01, \*\*\* = *p <* 0.001, – = parameters excluded due to collinearity a Reference category is fair discipline

b Reference category is intermediate discipline

#### **Use of Excessive Force**

The results from the full models for the three scenarios depicting the use of excessive force (Table 6.1) show that the traditional police integrity variables are again consistent with prior research and largely remain substantively unchanged relative to the results from the unconditional models presented in Chap. 2. The only substantive changes are the changes in the effect of the type of discipline that an offcer who engaged in this type of behavior would likely receive. The interpretation of the effects remains substantively unchanged in this full model, and the difference in the statistical signifcance of these two variables is largely attributable to the standard errors becoming more stable with the inclusion of the additional independent variables. In other words, the inclusion of these independent variables accounted for some amount of noise in the estimates of the traditional police integrity variables, especially as related to the expected type of discipline. The same is also true for the results assessing the effect of the measures of disciplinary fairness in these excessive force scenarios.

We now turn to the results from the measure of organizational justice. Although in Chap. 4 organizational justice was not signifcantly associated with adherence to the code of silence in the excessive force scenarios, a more complex pattern of the effect of organizational justice emerges after other independent variables are included in the multivariate models. Specifcally, for these scenarios depicting the use of excessive force, organizational justice increases adherence to the code of silence (failing to report a beating; OR = 1.37, *p* < 0.001), reduces adherence to the code of silence (verbally abusing motorist; OR = 0.60, *p* < 0.01), and exerts no signifcant effect (shooting suspect in the back; OR = 1.33, *p* > 0.05). It is unclear what drives these differential effects here, although the two scenarios where organizational justice is positively associated with adherence to the code of silence—regardless of whether the effect is signifcant—involve the use of physical force, and the other scenario does not.

Likewise, we see a complex set of fndings emerge for self-legitimacy. In Chap. 5, the effects of self-legitimacy on the code of silence were complicated. This pattern of fndings repeats itself here. Just like organizational justice, self-legitimacy increases the likelihood of adhering to the code of silence in one scenario (verbally abusing a motorist; OR = 1.61, *p* < 0.01), reduces the likelihood in one scenario (failing to report a beating; OR = 0.54, *p* < 0.001), and has no signifcant effect on the third (OR = 4.27, *p* > 0.05).

#### **Organizational Deviance**

The effects of the traditional police integrity variables in the organizational deviance scenarios (Table 6.1) are largely consistent with prior police integrity research. Furthermore, apart from reducing the effect sizes, the results are substantively similar to those presented in Chap. 2. Again, this suggests that the independent variables

are adding a unique explanatory power to the model, rather than being redundant with the police integrity theory variables.

Next, we turn to perceptions of disciplinary fairness for each of these three scenarios. The results here are substantively identical to those presented in Chap. 3. The key differences are seen in the reduction in the magnitude of the effect for each of these variables after the inclusion of the other independent variables. This would suggest that there is some redundancy with the disciplinary fairness and the other independent variables included in the model. The potential redundancy here is not entirely surprising, given the theoretical and empirical relationship between the constructs. A potential explanation for this effect may stem from the effects of organizational justice. Organizational justice is theoretically and—to varying degrees empirically associated with disciplinary fairness. Including both variables in the model can lead to some redundancy in the estimates, which seems to be the case here. In the full models, the effects of organizational justice are strengthened compared to the results in Chap. 4, and the interpretation of the effects remains substantively unchanged. These results suggest that there is some shared variance between disciplinary fairness and organizational justice, although not as much as might be expected.

Conversely, the results from self-legitimacy are quite different from the results presented in Chap. 5. In the models with only self-legitimacy and traditional police integrity measures, we see either a null or negative effect of self-legitimacy on the adherence to the code of silence (see Chap. 5). However, with the inclusion of the other independent variables, the pattern of fndings becomes more complex. We see that self-legitimacy reduces the likelihood that an offcer would adhere to the code of silence in covering a DUI crash of a fellow offcer (OR = 0.30, *p* < 0.001), but signifcantly increases adherence to the code of silence in the other two scenarios: falsely calling in sick (OR = 1.67, *p* < 0.05) and falsely reporting overtime (OR = 1.63, *p* < 0.05).

#### **Interpersonal Deviance**

Finally, we look at the results for the interpersonal deviance scenarios (Table 6.1). Again, the results from the traditional police integrity variables presented here are substantively identical to those presented in the unconditional models in Chap. 2. The same is true for the disciplinary fairness measures. Again, this would suggest that both the traditional police integrity variables and the disciplinary fairness measures exert independent effects on the adherence to the code of silence in these interpersonal deviance scenarios.

We notice some differences when examining the effect of perceptions of organizational justice in these interpersonal deviance scenarios. The results from Chap. 4, which only added organizational justice and traditional police integrity measures to the model, show that organizational justice is only associated with increased adherence to the code of silence for the scenario depicting the spreading of false rumors

about a coworker (OR = 1.50, *p* < 0.001). However, after including all of the independent variables in this chapter, the size of this effect has nearly doubled (OR = 2.86, *p* < 0.001). Additionally, we see that, unlike in Chap. 4, organizational justice now exerts signifcant—although differential—effects on adherence to the code of silence for the scenario depicting the telling of sexist jokes (OR = 0.63, *p* < 0.001) and the scenario depicting yelling at coworkers (OR = 2.77, *p* < 0.001).

Again, it is not entirely clear what is different about these scenarios that causes the differential effects of organizational justice. However, these varying results may suggest that offcers are not simply "pencil whipping" the survey, and instead are making independent judgments about each scenario. This contention seems to be supported by the pattern of results for self-legitimacy, which shows substantively opposite effects compared to organizational justice in these scenarios. In other words, when organizational justice increases adherence to the code of silence, selflegitimacy reduces it. Finally, again, we note that the inclusion of the other independent variables reduced the noise in the parameter estimates for self-legitimacy, a largely expected outcome in light of the theoretical and conceptual overlap of these constructs.

# **Conclusion**

Because of the police agencies' semi-military organization, the code of silence has developed in each police agency as part of police culture to protect police offcers (e.g., Bittner, 1970; Klockars et al., 2000). As Westley (1970) and Bittner (1970) hypothesized, police recruits are socialized into police culture—both at the police academy and during their feld training—and taught that they can rely only on their fellow offcers. One mechanism used to acquire this trust is adhering to the code of silence and, hence, protecting police misconduct committed by their fellow offcers.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the empirical analyses in this book (e.g., Chap. 2) reveal the presence of the code of silence among the police offcers in the police agency we study. Specifcally, for every scenario, including the most serious ones (i.e., stealing from a crime scene, abusing deadly force), there is a certain number of police offcers who said that they would not report misconduct. With the exception of these two scenarios, at least one out of fve police offcers, if not more, said that they would not report *any* type of misconduct described in our study. In fact, in some scenarios, such as accepting gratuities, verbally abusing citizens, or covering up DUI crash, the *majority* of the police offcers in our study seemed to be willing to adhere to the code of silence.

As various independent commissions (e.g., Knapp Commission, 1972; Mollen Commission, 1994) demonstrate, the code of silence—tolerance of police misconduct without reporting it—is a serious obstacle in the efforts to curtail police misconduct. Whereas assessing the contours of the code of silence is a critical step in such efforts (e.g., Klockars et al., 2000; 2004; Kutnjak Ivković & Haberfeld, 2015, 2019), it is not the only step. The goal of this book has been to determine the factors associated with the strong code of silence and offer evidence-based approach to curtailing the code of silence and, ultimately, police misconduct.

The results of our full models confrm the strong effect of the traditional police integrity measures (e.g., others' adherence to the code of silence, violation of agency rules, perceptions of seriousness) on the police offcers' decision to adhere to the code of silence. To begin with, we found the effects of police culture at play; in all 12 scenarios, offcers who assessed that their colleagues would not report police misconduct are also more likely to say that they would not report either. The perceptions of police culture tolerant of police misconduct have the strongest and most consistent effect on the respondents' own expressed willingness to adhere to the code of silence. This fnding, aligned with the extant literature (Hickman et al., 2016; Kutnjak Ivković et al., 2018, 2019; Long et al., 2013; Lim & Sloan, 2016; Peacock et al., 2020; Van Droogenbroeck et al., 2019), demonstrates the important effect that the police culture has on the way police offcers think about police misconduct. Police administrators interested in curtailing the code of silence should learn how accurate the police offcers' perceptions of their peer culture are. If police offcers' views indicate overconfdence in their peers' willingness to adhere to the code, police administrators should share with police offcers the more accurate view of their peer culture. On the other hand, if police offcers are accurately "reading" their peers' willingness to not report, then the more challenging task that the administrators have is to change the peer culture by conveying an unambiguous message about the importance of offcial rules and their consistent enforcement, as well as by providing the rewards for reporting.

This research shows that the more serious police offcers view police misconduct, the less likely they are to adhere to the code of silence. The result is strong and consistent across different forms of police misconduct. This strong negative relationship between the expressed willingness to adhere to the code of silence and perceptions of misconduct seriousness persists even in the presence of other potential factors, such as perceptions of organizational justice or self-legitimacy. These results ft the large body of extant police integrity literature (Cheloukhine et al., 2015; Haberfeld, 2004; Hickman et al., 2016; Khechumyan & Kutnjak Ivković, 2015; Klockars et al., 1997, 2004, 2006; Kutnjak Ivković et al., 2013, 2016, 2018, 2019; Kutnjak Ivković & Khechymian, 2013; Kutnjak Ivković & Sauerman, 2013; Lobnikar & Meško, 2015; Long et al., 2013; Lim & Sloan, 2016; Maskàly et al., 2019; Pagon & Lobnikar, 2000; Peacock et al., 2020; Porter & Prenzler, 2016; Vallmüür, 2015; Westmarland, 2006; Wu & Makin, 2019). They also open another avenue for police administrators willing to curtail the code of silence. Specifcally, police offcers should be (re)taught to view police misconduct as a serious matter. Nevertheless, police administrators should follow up and demonstrate—through the enforcement of offcial rules and administration of discipline for their violations that they perceive police misconduct as a serious matter as well.

How serious police misconduct is evaluated typically has been closely tied with the assumption that misconduct violates offcial rules and that discipline would result in such rule violations (e.g., Klockars et al., 2000, 2004, 2006; Kutnjak Ivković & Haberfeld, 2015, 2019). In about one-half of the scenarios, our full models do not link the knowledge that police misconduct described in the scenarios violates offcial rules with the respondents' expressed willingness to adhere to the code of silence. On the other hand, in most scenarios in which the relationship is statistically signifcant, there is a clear negative relationship between the respondents' recognition that the behavior violates offcial rules and their willingness to stick to the code of silence. These fndings demonstrate the importance of establishing clear offcial rules prohibiting misconduct (e.g., Klockars et al., 2000, 2006).