Award Date

12-1-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Criminal Justice

First Committee Member

William Sousa

Second Committee Member

Terance Miethe

Third Committee Member

Tamara Herold

Fourth Committee Member

Jaewon Lim

Number of Pages

169

Abstract

Recent high-profile and controversial police-related incidents have sparked an intensified public discourse on police misconduct. This has resulted in increasing calls for greater accountability and transparency within U.S. police agencies. Much of the existing research on police misconduct centers around two competing explanations: the "bad apples" perspective, which attributes misconduct to individual officers, and the "bad barrels" perspective, which points to systemic or organizational factors (Rojek, Decker, & Wagner, 2015). However, one factor that has been underexplored in the literature is the role of police stress in influencing deviant police behavior. Previous studies suggest a potential link between police-related stress and misconduct (Arter, 2007; Bishopp et al., 2016, 2019, 2020), yet this relationship remains insufficiently understood. This study explores the connection between police stress and officer misconduct. Using a sample of 3,623 police officers, both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses were conducted to assess the prevalence of police stress and misconduct, as well as the relationship between these factors. The findings, derived from count regression models and panel modeling, indicate that police-related stressors, proxy measures for police stress, are significant risk factors for misconduct. Additionally, other contextual factors, such as the productivity of officers (e.g., number of arrests), contribute to the likelihood of misconduct. These results highlight the complex interplay of individual, organizational, and contextual influences in shaping police deviance.

Keywords

Autoregressive cross-lagged panel model; Critical incidents; Panel model; Police deviance; Police misconduct; Stress in policing

Disciplines

Criminology | Criminology and Criminal Justice | Law Enforcement and Corrections

File Format

PDF

File Size

2013 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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