Police officers’ informal relationships and workplace interactions often guide police work. As well, organizational hierarchy shapes officers’ daily interactions through their rank, assignments, and partnerships. By studying police networks, insight can be gained into the social structure of departments, organizational cohesion and fragmentation, and the consequences of network structures on the diffusion of behaviors and attitudes. This project will investigate the dynamics of police networks on the social transmission of police behavior.
The project will employ surveys to collect longitudinal data from police officers across disparate law enforcement agencies in the U.S. The project’s comparative approach to its case studies will be used to analyze the informal network structure of police departments, and to identify how various officers are positioned within these network structures. The research will further test whether and how informal interactions and working relationships promote the diffusion of various behaviors, and it will examine the network structures most conducive to these behaviors. The project will advance our understanding of the informal social organization of policing in order to determine whether an officer’s position within departmental networks enables or constrains different behaviors or peer groupings. Findings will illustrate police network mechanisms and provide tools to identify and respond to problematic behaviors.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
