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Public Servants or Soldiers? A Test of the Police-Military Equivalency Hypothesis

Ilchi, Omeed S
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1535634126574304

Abstract Details

2018, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice.
During these times of escalating tensions between the police and the communities they serve, the news and social media have been full of images of police officers wearing military gear, armed with military weapons, and driving military vehicles. This study examined whether the blurred lines between police officers and soldiers have caused the public to begin to see police officers who work in urban areas as equivalent to soldiers in war zones. Using a sample of undergraduate college students in criminal justice classes at a Midwestern university, this study asks whether perceiving police officers to be equivalent to soldiers is related to negative attitudes towards the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods, weaker support for policies that seek to increase police accountability, an opposition to groups which seek to increase police accountability, and an opposition to convicting a local police officer for the shooting death of an unarmed African American man. The results of the study indicate that a belief in an equivalency between police officers and soldiers is not common in the sample, but it can be predicted by being white, holding more conservative values, and having more negative attitudes toward the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods. When used as an explanatory variable, a belief in the police-military equivalency does predict lower levels of support for independent prosecutions of police officers who shoot civilians, more negative attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter movement, and a lack of support for convicting a former campus police officer who was charged with murder for the shooting death of an unarmed African American man. The equivalency did not predict lower levels of support for independent investigations of police officers who shoot civilians. This would suggest that there is credibility to the idea that people who view the police as military may be more forgiving or permissive of police misconduct. In addition, the most consistent predictor of police accountability in the study was negative attitudes toward residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods. Overall, support for police accountability policies (independent investigations and prosecutions) was high, especially compared to support for Black Lives Matter and convicting the former campus police officer. The significance of race in predicting attitudes toward Black Lives Matter and support for convicting the former campus police officer suggests that white respondents are more likely to be opposed to or ambivalent towards these social justice causes. This could mean that the white respondents in the study supported the idea of police accountability in theory more than they support ways of accomplishing the goal of increasing police accountability and police accountability in action.
James Frank, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Robert A. Brown, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Bonnie Fisher, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Edward Latessa, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
166 p.
Criminology
Citizen Perceptions of the Police; Police Accountability; Police Militarization; Black Lives Matter

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ilchi, O. S. (2018). Public Servants or Soldiers? A Test of the Police-Military Equivalency Hypothesis [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1535634126574304

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ilchi, Omeed. Public Servants or Soldiers? A Test of the Police-Military Equivalency Hypothesis. 2018. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1535634126574304.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ilchi, Omeed. "Public Servants or Soldiers? A Test of the Police-Military Equivalency Hypothesis." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1535634126574304

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1535634126574304
677
© 2018, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Public Servants or Soldiers? A Test of the Police-Military Equivalency Hypothesis by Omeed S Ilchi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.