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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.

This study aims to bridge the police culture and the police employee well-being literature by demonstrating significant linkages between the two.

The authors examined the effects of culture on the well-being of officers in one police agency in the western United States during the summer of 2020. Using individual-level data, the authors model the association between officer perceptions of occupational culture and personal well-being for 125 sworn employees.

The results indicate that, for individual sworn officers, their adherence to elements of culture is related to well-being; specifically, burnout (BO) exhaustion, BO disengagement, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Additionally, the cultural attitudes of administration, and citizens in the population, are both consistent predictors of officer well-being.

This study provides an important linkage between the police culture and police well-being literature, which to date has been given limited attention.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the relation between police transformational leadership and organizational commitment is mediated by organizational culture. Drawing on the competing values framework (Quinn, 1988), four types of cultural orientations (group, developmental, hierarchical, and rational) are analyzed.

In total, 358 South Korean police officers are surveyed. Using competing values as multiple mediators, a parallel four mediator model is estimated. Bias-corrected bootstrapping methods are employed to consider the small sample size, as well as the possible non-normal distribution of specific indirect effects.

The linkage between transformational leadership and commitment appears to be fully mediated by group culture. Interestingly, multiple individual officer characteristics, duty type, and departmental size do not impact respective constructs overall.

The use of cross-sectional data hinders causal ordering among constructs included.

Given the full mediation relationships among the three constructs, it is advisable to develop more nuanced leadership training programs optimized for fostering “considerate and supportive leaders” who have been known to impact group culture.

Including two understudied police organizational correlates (i.e. transformational leadership and organizational culture), this study accounts for the mediating role of organizational culture in the transformational leadership-commitment link with multiple variables frequently used in previous research being controlled.

The focus of the current study is to assess whether officers' broad attitudinal orientations are linked with their situational perceptions of danger in various armed citizen encounters.

The authors draw on survey data from 672 officers employed at a large metropolitan police department. The police culture literature is used to inform measures of occupational stress, danger, citizen distrust, views of upper management, and role orientation in relation to how officers perceive danger across a series of scenarios involving armed citizens that varied in terms of firearm placement and citizen resistance. Along with a host of control variables, a series of multivariate models are used to evaluate the degree to which these aggregated cultural views may shape officers' situational perceptions of danger.

The results indicate that a stronger endorsement of broad attitudinal orientations involving occupational danger and citizen distrust are linked with higher perceptions of danger in armed-citizen encounters, especially as the situations become more discretionary.

Empirical research related to police culture has typically relied upon highly aggregated assessments of how officers view their occupational and organizational work environments. However, yet to be explored is whether these broad views impact officers' assessments of specific encounters, particularly those that are dangerous in nature. The findings from this study also have the potential to inform ambiguous use of force standards that are heavily influenced by officers' situational assessments of danger.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe police officers' opinions on the prevailing anxieties, feeling of fears and threats, attitudes towards crime and punishment.

The paper took a quantitative approach to data collection that included a survey on a representative sample of the Slovene police.

Comparisons of attitudes (anxieties of everyday troubles, feelings of insecurity, importance of appropriate measures against crime and adequate severity of punishment) has been conducted to find similarities and differences between police officers regarding gender and age. The results show that male police officers and senior police officers have more conservative attitudes towards the most appropriate measures against crime and are more likely to defend severe punishment of offenders. Such attitudes indicate persistence of traditional authoritarian police orientation in (post)modern society.

The results are generalizable for the Slovenian police but not generalizable for the police worldwide.

A useful source of information learning about some characteristics of police professional culture and police officers' attitudes towards punishment and their understanding of threats in society.

This paper furthers understanding of police occupational culture in a new democratic country.

Violence as a foundational element of police work is continuously reaffirmed and justified through police labour as ‘violence workers’ (Seigel, 2018). Hiring more female police officers has recently been seen as a way to reduce police violence. However, would employing more female officers change the relationship between policing and violence? Arguments in favour of more female police tend to rely on stereotypical understandings of gender, emphasising that women are naturally less aggressive and more likely to be caring and compassionate, often obscuring the violence enacted by female police officers in doing so. Female officers may be more likely to engage in violence out of necessity due to police culture and occupational norms around the use of force. Examining female police across countries such as the United States, Nigeria and Slovenia, this chapter establishes female police violence as a broader pattern, reflects on how female officers participate in police violence and addresses the extent to which masculinised police culture structures the expression of police violence. This chapter concludes with a discussion of why hiring more female police officers is not an adequate solution for reducing police violence, as police officers enact and are complicit in violence, regardless of gender.