This article was originally published in August 2017.
Life Course Centre Fellow, Dr Elise Sargeant, along with co-researcher LCC Research Fellow Dr Emma Antrobus and Assistant Commissioner Debbie Platz of the Queensland Police Service, had their paper ‘Promoting a culture of fairness: police training, procedural justice, and compliance’ published recently in the Journal of Experimental Criminology (July 2017).
As the researchers explain, police trainers want police recruits who can perform their job well, and behave in an ethical manner. This study examined ‘the relationship between procedural justice within the work environment (one element of organisational justice) and organisational compliance, or compliance with supervisors within the context of a police-recruit cultural training program [Voice 4 Values]’. That is, the willingness of police recruits to obey orders without considering or questioning those orders (blind compliance).
The cultural training program used as part of the study encouraged recruits to stand up against, intervene in, and report against racist and sexist behaviour in the policing organisation. As the researchers say in their article:
Procedural justice may, on the one hand, encourage compliance with positive cultural changes within the policing organisation, yet on the other hand, it may also encourage blind or unthinking compliance with directives that may further exacerbate the negative features of police culture such as solidarity and the code of silence.
Our measures of hard and soft compliance were designed to differentiate the willingness of police recruits to obey orders and the willingness to police recruits to obey orders without considering or questioning those orders.
Sargeant and her co-researchers concluded that ‘while procedural justice may be of interest to policing organisations, it is important that it is not used as a tool to encourage unthinking compliance’. Cultural training reduces the effect of procedural justice on blind compliance.
Read the article, here.