Police Integrity Research Paper Example

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Police integrity and police misconduct are closely related; traditionally, the discussion of police integrity typically would focus on the events that signal the lack of integrity (e.g., forms of police misconduct and the ways of controlling them). Since the mid-1990s, the focus has shifted on police integrity, which, in turn, allows for the exploration of a broader concept – the development of a high-integrity police agency. Police integrity is defined as “the normative inclination among police to resist temptations to abuse the rights and privileges of their occupation” (Klockars et al. 2006).

Although police integrity could be associated with the moral virtues of individual police officers, starting with the writings by Herman Goldstein in the 1970s, the idea has started to develop that this “bad apple” theory of police corruption is inadequate and that a more organizational approach should be used instead. Klockars and colleagues (Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2004; Klockars et al. 1997) built upon this view and proposed their theory of police integrity. The theory features four dimensions: organizational rulemaking, detection, investigation, and discipline of rule violations, curtailing the code of silence, and the influence of public expectations and agency history on police integrity. The accompanying methodological approach has been utilized to survey police officers and to detect the contours of police integrity in nearly 20 countries across the world. Other research on police integrity explores the mechanisms used to enhance integrity and accountability, such as the early warning systems and citizen reviews.

Police Integrity

Introduction

In the 1990s, a wave of police misconduct scandals shook the country, from the police corruption scandal in New York, which prompted the establishment of the Mollen Commission, the Rodney King beating, which resulted in the establishment of the Christopher Commission, the Abner Luima sexual violence case in New York, which resulted in $8.75 million dollar settlement, and the Rampart Division scandal in Los Angeles. In 1997, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) held a national symposium bringing together policy makers and social scientists to address this emerging problem. A natural tendency would be to anchor the conference on the events that signal the lack of integrity. That is, the discussion would center on various forms of misconduct and the ways of controlling them. As Hickman and colleagues (2004, p. 1.1) put it, “[a]ll too often we infer integrity from its demonstrated absence. That is to say, research that focuses on corruption infers ideas about integrity absent its measurement.” Instead, the COPS/NIJ team decided to use the term police integrity as the guiding theme for the conference (Greenberg 1997, p. v):

The focus on “police integrity” opened a whole new domain. Although previous research, study, and experimentation had focused on critical issues such as corruption and excessive use of force, these approaches, had, in fact, revolved around single dimension. As a result, the solutions were constricted in that they were derived out of a need to control unwanted behaviors of individuals. In comparison, police integrity guided the focus on the broader domain of developing a healthy organization that would serve to reinforce and maintain the good character and constructive motivations of many of the individuals joining the ranks of law enforcement.

In July of 1996, about 200 police leaders, politicians, lawyers, and researchers attended a three-day National Symposium on Police Integrity in Washington, D.C. (Gaffigan and McDonald 1997). Among the participants who tried to define police integrity, the preferred approach was to envision a police officer with high integrity and list the characteristics (e.g., virtues, values, and character traits) that separate this police officer apart from other police officers of lower integrity. The characteristics explicitly listed at the Symposium were allegiance, courage, honor, honesty, prudence, trust, effacement of self-interest, intellectual honesty, justice, morality, principled behavior, responsibility, and dedication to mission (Vicchio 1997). Mark Moore was in charge of summarizing the findings of the symposium; he wrote that “[w]hat we mean by integrity and professionalism is law-abiding character, technical confidence, neutrality, distance – in Steve Vicchio’s wonderful phrase, ‘the effacement of personal interest’ – and probably some notion of courtesy and client responsiveness” (Moore 1997, p. 63). Similarly, Hickman and colleagues wrote in their introductory remarks to a co-edited book on police integrity that “police integrity refers to the underlying values and ethical attachment of the police and how those values and ethics affect police behavior” (Hickman et al. 2004, p. 1.1).

These lists of characteristics contain expected individual police officers’ character traits. As Klockars and colleagues argue (2006, p. xiv), “[t]he fact is that any virtue – charity, compassion, decency, faith, loyalty, passion, patience, and perspective, to add but a few to the list mentioned at the Symposium – is at least arguably as crucial to the integrity of a professional police officer as any other and this approach gives us no guidance whatsoever in prioritizing this litany.” Yet, some of the officers who exhibit these characteristics may decide not to act in accordance with high integrity, just like the police officers who do not possess many of these characteristics may decide to act in accordance with high integrity. Finally, these character traits are features of individuals and they close the possibility that police integrity could be an organizational feature as well.

Since 1996, the issue of police integrity has been discussed at several conferences (“the 1999 NIJ/NYU Seminar on Police Integrity and Democracies; the 1999 Strengthening Police-Community Relationships conference; the 2000 biannual conference Policing in Central and Eastern Europe: Ethics, Integrity, and Human Right (Pagon 2000); the 1998 Sixth International Conference on Ethics: Integrity at the Public-Private Interface (Huberts and van den Heuvel 1999”)), and continues to be explored bi-annually at corruption conferences such as the Global Forum against Corruption and Safeguarding Integrity and the Transparency International’s International Anti-Corruption Conference. The US Department of Justice provided a publication addressing the Principles for Promoting Police Integrity (2001). The co-edited book Police Integrity and Ethics (Hickman et al. 2004) contains chapters addressing various aspects of police integrity. However, the understanding of what police integrity is, and what should be covered under this topic, varies substantially across conference organizers, presenters, and authors. A substantial portion of the literature seeks to develop integrity-enhancing mechanisms or mechanisms that would control police misconduct (Pope 2000; Transparency International 2001; U.S. Department of Justice 2001).

Yet, it seems that even the basic debate regarding what constitutes police integrity has not been resolved. Sam Walker, a leading expert on police accountability, points out that “[t]he issue of police integrity is extremely important and has received an increasing amount of public attention among policy makers and the general public. Unfortunately, the academic literature has not adequately addressed this very important subject” (2004, p. vii).

Definition

Klockars and colleagues (Klockars et al. 2006) have provided a definition of police integrity that goes beyond the traditional focus on individual police officers’ character traits and allows for the organizational approach toward it. They have also accompanied the definition with a theory of police integrity and the methodological approach toward its measurement. Klockars and colleagues (2006) define police integrity as “the normative inclination among police to resist temptations to abuse the rights and privileges of their occupation.” According to the authors (Klockars et al. 2006), this definition has six critical components.

Normative – The normative aspect of the definition emphasizes that integrity is based on the moral norms of right and wrong (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 1) that tell people what they should or should not do. Thus, integrity combines a belief in moral values with an inclination to behave in accordance with that belief; “[j]ust as a belief in honesty inclines one to avoid lying and a belief in fidelity obliges one to be faithful, integrity requires not only a belief that certain behaviors are right or wrong, but also actions that are in accord with those beliefs” (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 2).

Inclination to Resist – This part of the definition emphasizes the difference between attitudes and behavior. The authors do not expect that the person of high integrity will always behave in accordance with these values. Rather, they discuss a general problem that people who believe in honesty sometimes lie; people who believe in fidelity sometimes are unfaithful; and people of integrity sometimes do things they know are wrong. Three dimensions of the relation between police attitudes of integrity and police misconduct are addressed.

The first point the authors emphasize is that, while integrity describes the normative inclination to resist temptations, integrity is not the only source (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 3). Other possible candidates include the lack of imagination, lack of opportunity, fear of discovery and public humiliation, shame, punishment, or a simple unfavorable risk/reward calculus as potentially critical in ensuring that police officers behave honestly. The second point the authors emphasize is that that attitudes of integrity put at least some pressure on police officers who share them to actually avoid wrongful behavior. Because these attitudes of integrity may lead police officers to comply with the rules and, at the same time, may not necessarily be the driving force behind compliant behavior, the authors have decided to refer to integrity as the inclination to resist rather than the actual resistance to temptations. The third point the authors emphasize is that the direction of the causal relation between attitudes of integrity and behavior of integrity is not always absolutely clear. In particular, while attitudes may cause behavior, behavior may also cause attitudes. Requiring of police officers to behave in accordance with integrity may lead them to adopt the attitudes of integrity as well.

Police – Klockars et al. (2006) emphasize that integrity is a characteristic of the “police,” without specifying that this is a characteristic of individual police officers or police agencies. This reflects the view that integrity may be a feature of an individual police officer, a group of police officers, a subunit of a police agency, a whole police agency, or police agencies. The authors caution that the discussion about police integrity easily lapses into the discussion of integrity at the police officers’ individual level. Yet, police integrity is also an organizational feature – a feature of police agencies, organizations, and institutions – and we can discuss organizational cultures of police integrity. However, the discussion of the dynamics and the relevant correlates of police integrity will differ depending on the level of integrity under discussion (e.g., individual, organizational); “[h]ow one understands and explains the psychology of integrity of an individual police officer will most certainly differ from the understanding and explanation of the evolution of a culture of integrity in a police agency” (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 3).

Temptations – The motivation or the reasons why police officers engage in misconduct could vary dramatically across forms of police misconduct, individual police officers, and police agencies. The most obvious of these temptations is gain, the monetary or non-monetary reward for type of police misbehavior, a typical feature of traditional police corruption. However, other forms of police misconduct are not necessarily motivated by gain; different forms of police misconduct are by no means the product of a similar, singular, or even ignoble temptation. The example of use of excessive force is particularly illustrative (Klockars 1995, p. 17):

…[the excessive force] need not (and usually will not) be the product of malicious or sadistic behavior. It can spring from good intentions as well as bad, mistakes and misreading, lack of experience, overconfidence, momentary inattention, physical or mental fatigue, experimentation, inadequate or improper training, prejudice, passion, an urge to do justice or demonstrate bravery, misplaced trust, boredom, illness, a specific incompetence, or a hundred other factors that might influence an officer to behave in a particular situation in a less than expert way.

Klockars et al. (2006) conclude that the methods used to control misconduct should differ depending on the type of temptation and argue that the methods used to control corruption could be quite different for the methods used to control the use of excessive force. They also infer not only that the contours of integrity may be very different in different police agencies, but also that the contours of police integrity within the same police agency could be different depending on the form of police misconduct. They argue that police integrity need not be a uniform phenomenon. Consequently, “it is not difficult to imagine a police organization or subculture that was highly intolerant of officer theft, soliciting bribes, taking kickbacks and other acts of corruption and at the same time was much more accepting of discourtesy, excessive force, perjury, forging records, fabricating evidence, or unwarranted or illegal searches” (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 4). The authors proceed to note that one could also expect that police officers who succumbed to the temptations of one variety (e.g., gain) may also be more likely to succumb to the temptations of another variety (e.g., prejudice).

Abuse – A crucial element of the definition is the concept of abuse. In many situations, the abuse of office is obvious (e.g., a police officer accepts a bribe in exchange for letting the citizen caught violating the speeding limit). However, the discussion of whether particular behavior is abusive is confounded by two possible arguments. The first argument flatly denies that the behavior in question is abusive. For example, the police officers’ acceptance of discounts, holiday gifts, free food, and liquor could be viewed as gestures of goodwill, hospitality, and/or gratitude. The second argument recognizes that the behavior could be abusive, but justifies and excuses it as an expression of “street justice.” As Klockars and colleagues (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 5) elaborate, “[a] common theme is that police are ‘human’ and cannot be expected to behave without normal human emotions in situations in which they are insulted, defied, assaulted, deceived, shocked, repulsed, disgusted, or horrified by the conduct of those they police.”

The Rights and Privileges of Their Occupation – Policing is a highly discretionary, coercive activity that routinely takes place in private settings, out of the sight of supervisors, and before witnesses who are often regarded as unreliable. Policing as an occupation is rife with opportunities for misconduct, as independent commission reports and scholarly studies clearly demonstrate (see, e.g., Christopher Commission 1991; Knapp Commission 1972; Manning and Redlinger 1993; Mollen Commission 1994; Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1974).

Causes Of Police Integrity

Until relatively recently, the prevailing administrative view of integrity (at least in the United States) was to associate integrity with the moral virtues of individual police officers; consequently, the tendency was to fight corruption, for example, by carefully screening applicants for police positions, pursuing defective officers aggressively, and removing them from their police positions before their behavior spreads throughout the agency (see, e.g., Knapp Commission 1972). In the 1970s, Herman Goldstein (1975) embarked on the pioneering work and argued that this “bad apple” theory of police corruption is inadequate and that a more organizational approach should be used instead.

Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ and their colleagues (Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2004; Klockars et al. 1997) built upon this view and proposed their theory of police integrity. This approach stresses the importance of four distinct dimensions, each of which is profoundly organizational in nature.

Organizational Rulemaking – The first dimension of the organizational theory of police integrity addresses organizational rule making (see, e.g., Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2003; Klockars et al. 1997) and relates police misconduct to the ways police agencies create, teach, and enforce rules explicitly prohibiting misbehavior (Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2003, p. 1.4). In countries with highly decentralized police organization, as is the case with the United States, police agencies could differ dramatically in the nature of the behavior they prohibit. First, agencies could differ in terms of whether they have official rules at all. Some agencies may have no written rules, particularly if they are very small (fewer than 10 police officers), while others, particularly if they are very large (with 500 sworn officers or more), may have extremely lengthy official rules (e.g., standard operating procedures, official rules). Second, when they do have the official rules established, the behaviors those rules allow and prohibit may differ substantially from agency to agency. This is particularly the case for less serious forms of misconduct such as mala prohibita corrupt behavior (e.g., receipt of favors, gratuities, small gifts, free meals, and discounts, off-duty employment).

The problem of organizational rulemaking is further complicated by the fact that in many agencies, while an agency’s official policy formally prohibits certain activities, the agency’s unofficial policy tolerates them (see, e.g., Knapp Commission 1972; Mollen Commission 1994). The obligations of rulemaking require police agencies not only to develop both formal and informal rules that specify agency expectations of integrity, but also to teach these rules and enforce them. As Klockars and colleagues conclude (2006, p. 9), “[i]n a police agency of integrity police officers ought to know the agency’s integrity relevant rules, understand the agency’s rationale for them, and believe in the rightness of both.”

Detecting, Investigating, and Disciplining Rule Violations – The second dimension of the organizational theory of police integrity focuses on both the creation and maintenance of activities that permit detection, investigation, and discipline of misconduct (see, e.g., Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2003; Klockars et al. 1997). The activities are heterogeneous by nature. They include not only reactive and proactive investigations by police agencies, but also inspections, audits, early-warning systems, external reviews, reception of citizen complaints, and integrity testing. The extent to which these activities have been implemented and actually used by a police agency varies substantially across the agencies. According to Klockars and colleagues (2006, p. 9), in a police agency of integrity the occupational culture of the agency will support the introduction and management of the activities employed to detect, investigate, and discipline rule-violating behavior.

Circumscribing “The Code” – The third dimension of the organizational theory of police integrity emphasizes the police agency’s obligation to circumscribe the code of silence (i.e., “the blue curtain,” “the code”). The code of silence refers to the norm of the police culture which prohibits reporting of misconduct by fellow police officers (see, e.g., Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2003; Klockars et al. 1997). However, although potentially viewed as a single norm that could apply to all police officers, the reality is that the code of silence could vary substantially. First, exactly what behavior – in terms of its nature and seriousness – is covered by the code varies enormously across police agencies. The code of silence in some agencies may cover only the least serious forms of corruption (e.g., the acceptance of gratuities and small gifts), while in others it can cover even the most serious forms of corruption (e.g., thefts from crime scenes, the acceptance of bribes from motorists caught speeding). Second, to whom the benefit of the code’s protection is extended could also vary extensively. In some agencies, the code could be limited to protect only misconduct by partners, viewed a testimonial immunity that would be a mirror image of traditionally privileged relationships (husband and wife, physician and patient, lawyer and client). In other agencies, the code could protect misconduct not only by police partners, but also by all police officers working on the same shift, section, or unit. Klockars and colleagues (2006, p. 9) write about the close relation between the code of silence and integrity:

Many police administrators probably understand that circumscribing both whom and what The Code covers should be an administrative priority … However virtually all police administrators were line officers at some point in their careers, and thus they have at least an appreciation, if not an affection, for the bonds of collegial loyalty and fraternal support that are part of the subculture of policing. To the extent that circumscribing The Code requires the weakening of those bonds of loyalty and support, it is a task that not a few police administrators approach with ambivalence. A police agency of integrity is one in which the occupational culture is intolerant of those who abuse the rights and privileges of their office.

The Influence of Public Expectations and Agency History on Police Integrity – The fourth dimension of the organizational theory of police integrity relates to the influence of the social and political environment in which police institutions, systems, and agencies operate (see, e.g., Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2003; Klockars et al. 1997). This theory argues that the integrity of a police agency is affected by the larger social and political environment in which it operates (Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2003). Although this understanding – the idea that the police agency is affected by its environment – is the underlying assumption of virtually all historical studies of police, Reiss and Bordua (1967; Reiss 1971) were the pioneers who provided the first systematic exploration of the topic.

When the society at large expects ethical behavior of its officials, police agencies are also more likely to set high expectations and expect ethical behavior from its employees. Not only do the expectations of integrity differ enormously across the world (see, e.g., Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index), but they could also differ within the same country. Using the United States as an example, Klockars and colleagues (2006, p. 10) argue that some parts of the country have long and virtually uninterrupted traditions of persistent police corruption (e.g., Chicago, New Orleans, Key West), some areas have equally long traditions of integrity (e.g., Milwaukee, Kansas City), and other areas have undergone repeated cycles of scandal and reform (e.g., New York, Philadelphia, Oakland). In the end, Klockars and colleagues conclude that “not only public expectations about police integrity exert vastly different pressures on police agencies in different areas, but also police agencies of integrity may effectively resist such pressures” (2006, p. 10).

Measuring The Extent Of Police Integrity

Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ (2003) designed a questionnaire that seeks to measure the extent of police integrity in systematic, standardized, and quantitative manner. The respondents were provided with a letter asking them to assume that the officer described in the scenarios had been a police officer for 5 years, had a satisfactory working record, and had not been disciplined in the past. The first version of the questionnaire contains 11 hypothetical scenarios focusing mostly on corruption and ranging from those merely giving an appearance of a conflict of interest to those describing incidents of bribery and theft (Klockars and Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2004; Klockars et al. 1997). The second version of the questionnaire went beyond seeing police integrity as the opposite of police corruption and includes a range of police misconduct such as the use of excessive force, failure to execute an arrest warrant, and falsification of official record, as well as police corruption. Each scenario is followed by the same set of seven questions that ask about police officers’ knowledge of official rules, their opinion about the seriousness of particular rule-violating behaviors, the discipline these behaviors should receive and would actually receive, and their estimates of how willing they would be to report such behavior.

The first version of the questionnaire has been distributed across 30 police agencies in the United States (Klockars et al. 1997, 2000), characterized with a decentralized police. The authors reported substantial differences across the agencies. Although the sample of police agencies is not nationally representative, but a convenience sample, it nevertheless illustrates the point that the level of police integrity could vary substantially across the police agencies. Klockars and colleagues (2000) created a ranking of police agencies based on their levels of integrity. The authors (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 37) note:

In some police agencies in our sample police officers found nearly half of the behaviors described in our sample to be of sufficient seriousness to merit dismissal. In those agencies officers also claimed that they and their police colleagues were highly likely to report all but the least serious forms of misconduct. In other agencies only theft from a crime scene was, in the opinion of a plurality of respondents, sufficient grounds to fire a police officer and not even that offence would motivate the majority of officers in such agencies to break the Code of Silence and report the misconduct of a colleague.

A comparison of the results from the two large municipal police agencies, one ranked at the top and one at the bottom of the police integrity scale, shows large differences in how serious police officers perceive misconduct, what discipline they expect and approve, and how wiling they seem to be to report the fellow officers’ misconduct. With one exception, police officers from the agency at the bottom of the police integrity scale would not expect the police officer to be dismissed for any of the behaviors described in the questionnaire, while the police officers from the agency at the top of the police integrity scale expected dismissal in four most serious cases. In addition, Klockars and colleagues (Klockars et al. 2006) found stark contrasts in the extent of the code of silence between the two agencies: in the agency ranked at the top of the integrity scale, the majority of police officers reported that their colleagues would report their fellow officer who engaged in the behavior described in all cases. On the other hand, the majority of police officers from the agency ranked at the bottom of police integrity scale did not expect their fellow officers to report misconduct in any of the described cases.

However, as the subsequent study of three large municipal police agencies (identified to be in the top third of the police integrity scale) demonstrates, police agencies can be quite diverse in the ways they create and maintain their integrity (Klockars et al. 2006). The authors studied each of these three agencies – Charleston, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; and St. Petersburg, Florida – for two years and have developed their integrity profiles.

Since 1996, nearly two dozen studies have used this first police integrity survey. Three studies (Micucci and Gomme 2009; Burbach Raines 2009; Marche 2009) analyzed the 30-agency data collected by Klockars and colleagues, and another four studies (Chappell and Piquero 2004; Hickman, et al. 2004; Schafer and Martinelli 2008, Gottschalk 2009) used the police integrity questionnaire as the basis for their surveys of other US police agencies. In addition to the US agencies, the same questionnaire has been used in nearly 20 countries across the world, including Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, and the UK (see Klockars et al. 2004).

Although the list of the countries participating in the survey is far from exhaustive, the findings clearly show that the levels of police integrity differ substantially and significantly, analogously to the tremendous variation in the levels of police integrity across the 30 US police agencies. The nature and extent of police integrity measured in the countries such as Finland and Sweden is quite different from the nature and extent of the police integrity measured in countries such as South Africa and Pakistan (see Klockars et al. 2004). The differences are visible not only in the police officers’ perceptions of seriousness and willingness to report, but also in their views of appropriate and expected discipline (Klockars et al. 2004, p. 13):

It appears that in each country the seriousness of officers’ misconduct is, in large part, determined by the absolute level of discipline the organization is expected to visit on the offending officer. In almost every case, when the police organization is expected to punish a offense very severely, officers regard that offense as serious. Conversely, when organizations do not punish misbehavior severely, as is the case in Hungary, Pakistan, and South Africa, officers seem to have little ability to distinguish among the levels of seriousness with regard to misconduct. Perhaps the most dramatic finding that emerges from examining the contours of integrity concerns the worldwide prevalence of the code of silence.

The authors continue to note that, in five out of 14 countries included in the book “Contours of Police Integrity,” the code of silence would cover misconduct described in every scenario (Klockars et al. 2004, p. 17). In addition, the code of silence would protect behaviors such as the acceptance of a bribe from a person caught speeding – a violation of the penal code – in nine out of 14 countries.

The heterogeneity of police integrity is influenced by a host of reasons; a police agency’s local social, political, economic, and legal environments influence its level of police integrity. Research indicates that countries that belong to the same category along one dimension (e.g., economic development, geographic location) still have different levels of police integrity. This is the case for both developed democracies (e.g., the USA and the UK) and countries in transition (e.g., Croatia and Hungary), as is the case for countries from Northern America (e.g., the USA and Canada) and Europe (e.g., Croatia and the Netherlands).

The second version of the questionnaire, exploring the resistance to various sources of temptations (not only police corruption), has been developed as well. The initial work by Klockars and colleagues explored the extent of police integrity in three US police agencies using both versions of the questionnaire (see Klockars et al. 2006). The comparative efforts are underway, with the first results coming from Croatia (Kutnjak Ivkovic´ 2009), South Korea (Kutnjak Ivkovic´ and Kang 2011), and South Africa (Kutnjak Ivkovic´ and Sauerman 2012).

Other Research On Police Integrity

The issues of police integrity and police misconduct are closely interconnected. Please see separate entries addressing different forms of police misconduct (e.g., “police corruption,” “use of excessive force,” “police lying”). A few writings explicitly connect police misconduct (or any of its specific forms) with police integrity. For example, Garner and colleagues (2004) studied the patterns in the police use of force as a way of measuring police integrity. The authors (Garner et al. 2004, p. 6.119) conclude that, although the average extent of force used by the police during a typical arrest is about equal across racial categories (and thus should be taken as an indication of police integrity), the extent of force used by the police during a typical arrest of male suspects is larger than the quantity of force used during a typical arrest of female suspects (and thus should be taken as an indication of the lack of police integrity).

In 2001, the US Department of Justice published Principles of Promoting Police Integrity. The publication, available in print and on the Internet, lists the “best practices” for promoting integrity. The first part of the publication explores the use of force, complaint and misconduct investigations, training, recruitment, hiring, and retention, as well as general principles of promoting accountability and effective police management. The second part of the publication contains examples of promising police practices and policies, as well as the research projects on police integrity funded by the US Department of Justice. Many of the practices that should be used to enhance integrity (e.g., complaint misconduct investigations, the early warning systems, citizen reviews), at the same time, are mechanisms of accountability. Publications like that, focusing on the specific mechanisms or practices that should be used to enhance integrity, have significantly grown in numbers since the late 1990s.

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