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This study explores how police culture is experienced by women officers serving in positions where they are significantly underrepresented (i.e. leadership and elite specialty units) and the environmental factors that shape these experiences.

A qualitative analysis of transcripts from interviews with 71 women serving in male-dominated roles was conducted (N = 39 ranking women; N = 32 women on elite units).

Participants described five occupational, organizational and assignment-level factors that shaped their workplace experiences. While some contextual forces at play are similar for women working patrol (e.g. traditional police culture, the underrepresentation of women in law enforcement) unique position-level factors were also identified (e.g. the high-risk and consequential nature of the work).

While the cultural environment for women patrol officers has improved in the past few decades, the same cannot be said for women working in positions that are still dominated by men. More attention to this area of policing is needed to ensure gender diversity is achieved throughout organizations and not only in positions deemed suitable for women.

The study extends research on women in policing beyond the focus on patrol. Further, it explores the assignment- and rank-based perspectives of police culture, which are largely absent from the literature.

The purpose of this paper was to examine law enforcement officers' perspectives on job stress and barriers to supportive resources when working child sexual abuse cases in a large southern state. It is well documented in the literature that professionals who work in healthcare, emergency services and law enforcement face tremendous amounts of stress and consequences to their physical and mental health. Little research has been done to examine how child sexual abuse investigations impact law enforcement, and how these specialized officers perceive access to supportive resources.

This qualitative study was part of a larger quantitative study and included 20 law enforcement officers who participated in anonymous, semi-structured phone interviews.

Findings included (1) child sexual abuse cases are difficult, specialized and disturbing (2) barriers to supportive resources include law enforcement culture, the stigma of asking for help, awareness and accessibility of resources and leadership as gatekeeper to the resources and (3) officers perceive both formal and informal resources to be helpful and at best should be proactively available to all officers in the state. A model of the findings was developed to illustrate the implications for practitioners and scholars.

This study was not without weaknesses, specifically the small number of participants, volunteer sampling does not represent the general population and the sampling technique means some demographics may have been missed by researchers.

This study adds to the literature on law enforcement mental health, occupational health and mental health resources. It confirms established research in the literature and provides insight into officer perspectives about barriers that prevent access to informal and formal supports that could improve their emotional well-being.

This study is the first of its kind, to our knowledge, that asks detectives and investigators of child abuse cases about mental health resources. These law enforcement officers are at high-risk for traumatic stress, compassion fatigue and burnout due to the specialized cases they investigate.

Recently, the interest of scholars studying procedural justice in policing has shifted from the relationship between procedural justice and citizen compliance to trust in police officers’ perceptions of who exercises it. This study explores the relationship between organizational justice and the perception of procedural justice from the perspective of police officers. Furthermore, it investigates the mediating roles of discretion and responsiveness.

Using 441 survey responses from South Korean police officers, a mediation model is outlined and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results showed that police officers’ perceptions of organizational justice had indirect effects on the perceived importance of procedural justice. Moreover, discretion and responsiveness mediate the relationship between organizational justice and perceived procedural justice.

Officers who perceive police fairness are more likely to have a positive perception of procedural justice toward citizens when they have a higher level of discretion and responsiveness. However, police officers’ perceptions of organizational justice are not directly linked to their perceptions of procedural justice.

This study contributes to the generalization of knowledge by empirically testing Van Craen’s theoretical model of the Korean police. It also expands the existing theoretical model by investigating the influence of overall organizational justice and its possible mediators on procedural justice.

The media is described as a fourth estate of the realm due to its ability to frame and shape discussions on governance and provide a stimulus for fighting corruption. But is the media really an effective tool for fighting corruption? This question arises due to the possibility of the media being used for propaganda, biased reporting and media owners’ and journalists’ engagement in corruption. The current study addresses the question by exploring the relationship between the media and corruption from the perspectives of Ghanaian justice and anti-corruption officials.

The study adopts a qualitative approach by interviewing justice and anti-corruption officials across three administrative regions in Ghana.

The results show that while justice officials describe the media as a medium for accusing officials unjustifiably and exaggerating the scale of corruption, anti-corruption officials believe the media helps to fight corruption. In addition to uncovering and exposing public officials’ corruption, the media is also a double-edged sword characterised by intra-vigilance: the media hold “their own” (i.e. journalists fighting corruption) accountable through criticism and exposure of wrongdoings.

The double-edged nature of the media can strengthen and enhance the fight against corruption because anti-corruption actors and journalists will be cautious as misjudgements or errors committed will not be overlooked or concealed by the media. Therefore, anti-corruption agencies in Ghana can collaborate with the media to uncover and expose corruption committed by public officials and even journalists or media owners.

This study is the first in Ghana to explore the relationship between the media and corruption from the perspectives of justice and anti-corruption officials. The approach, frameworks and methodology adopted in this study can be applied in similar studies in other countries on the African continent and beyond.

Active shooter incidents have risen considerably in recent years, elevating public and law enforcement focus on improving response to these incidents. The contemporary policy for reacting to an active shooter event is for the officers who first arrive on the scene to move quickly to engage and neutralize a shooter, prioritizing victim safety and minimizing loss of life. This study provides a preliminary understanding of the police view regarding their role in active shooter events and their experiences with active shooter training.

We conducted a survey of 413 sworn personnel across three US cities. Analyses examine differences in officers’ training experiences across the agencies and predictors of a sense of duty to prioritize victims’ lives over that of officers.

Officers’ training experiences differed by agency, yet most officers supported a duty to sacrifice their lives to prioritize victims’ safety during active shooter incidents. Officers with more years of experience have lower odds of supporting a duty to sacrifice their lives to save victims during an active shooter situation relative to less experienced officers. Respondents who recall officer safety among the top three most memorable topics from their recent active shooter training also have lower odds of supporting a duty to sacrifice.

The authors add knowledge about police officers’ experiences with active shooter training and officers’ opinions about their role in responding to active shooter incidents. We discuss implications of the findings relative to police culture and training and suggest directions for future research.

This article examines challenges and strategies related to police relationships and engagement with rural communities in England and Wales, Australia and France. It aims to bridge a gap in knowledge around how police balance public demands with organisational and contextual constraints, exploring the role of communication technology in overcoming geographical and cultural barriers in rural policing.

The research draws upon 121 semi-structured interviews conducted across three distinct jurisdictions. In the United Kingdom and Australia, interviews were conducted via Microsoft Teams, while face-to-face interviews were conducted in France. Participants were recruited through the purposive sampling of police working in rural areas. The data were thematically analysed using NVivo Software.

Rural communities have low expectations of policing services, a consequence of geography, organisational structures and limited resource allocation. Building relationships can be challenging owing to isolation and terrain, the need for officers to have local and cultural knowledge, and difficulties in recruiting officers in rural posts. Technology-mediated communication has played a part in the solutions (e.g. social media). However, this may not always be suitable owing to limited connectivity, citizen and police preferences for communication and engagement, and the institutional and cultural nuances surrounding the application of technology.

This article provides empirical insights into the attitudes and experiences of rural police officers, highlighting the distinctive policing context and engagement needs of rural communities. The research underscores the necessity for contextually aware engagement. It suggests that while technology-mediated communication offers some solutions to spatial challenges, its effectiveness may be limited by access, generational preferences and the adaptability of police institutions and cultures.

This study explored the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on rural municipal police in Pennsylvania.

The authors surveyed rural police chiefs and sworn officers to inquire about their intra-department organizational capabilities, police-community relations, well-being practices, and how these strategies may have developed since March 2020.

The pandemic affected rural police officers and rural policing strategies in many ways. Moreover, existing challenges to limited rural police budgets were exacerbated suggesting a need for more flexible budgetary capacities, access to wellness resources were limited suggesting better access to these resources and preparation for responding to public health emergencies was limited suggesting more complete training is warranted.

This study draws attention to the unique experiences of rural municipal police across one state by capturing specific areas of concern throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

This paper explores the challenging nexus of police custody, risk and intra-organisational boundaries in the context of a recently reformed national police service. Police custody is an often-hidden aspect of policing, away from the public gaze and scrutiny. Although there is increasing recognition of the importance of rural policing (e.g. Harkness (2020); Mawby and Yarwood (2011); Ruddell and Jones (2020); Yarwood and Wooff (2016)), there has been little or no focus on rural police custody. This paper seeks to begin to redress this by focussing on the challenges faced by rural police custody in the context of large-scale organisational change.

This paper draws on data from a study funded by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (2016–2018), entitled “Measuring Risk and Efficiency in Police Custody in Scotland”. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology to develop an understanding of the varying nature of police custody across Scotland. Two contrasting case study locations were selected, one urban and one rural. 12 semi-structured interviews and 15 hours of observation were carried out. Data was transcribed, coded and analysed and thematic analysis enabled themes to be developed. This paper draws on the data from the rural custody suite.

Drawing on the theoretical framework of Giacomantonio (2014) and more recent considerations of abstract policing Terpstra et al. (2019), this paper offers insights into the ways that police custody in rural Scotland has been organised, against the backdrop of challenging organisational change. I argue that as policing services in Scotland have become increasingly “abstract” from communities, police custody as a national division has witnessed the impact of this more greatly than other parts of local policing. Intra-organisational management around staffing has led to complex management of risk, illustrating some of the challenges of national organisational change on police custody.

This paper focuses on the impact of large scale organisational change on rural police custody and intra-organisational relationships and dynamics. Rural policing is still a largely neglected area of study and rural police custody is even less understood. This paper therefore provides an original contribution by focusing on this under-researched area of policing. It also illustrates complexity around risk, staffing and management of people being held in rural police custody suites. It is therefore of value to policing scholars in other contexts, as well as rural criminology more generally. It has applicability to international contexts where macro level policing reform is occurring.

This study examined the effects of organizational justice and citizen respect to support for democratic policing through self-legitimacy among South Korean police officers.

The authors used survey data from 467 South Korean police officers in 2022. Structural equation model analysis was used to examine relationships between each variable.

This study found a positive relationship between organizational justice and self-assessed legitimacy. Also, citizen respect had a positive relationship with both police officers' self-assessed legitimacy and audience legitimacy. Self-assessed legitimacy had a significant effect on support for democratic policing, while perceived-audience legitimacy did not have a significant effect on support for democratic policing.

The current study provides evidence that self-legitimacy affects supporting democratic policing in a non-Western democracy. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the role of police self-legitimacy as a link between organizational justice and citizen respect and the intended behaviors of police officers toward citizens.