Social ecology and the vigor of police response: An empirical study of contexts, work norms and patrol officer behavior

Many explanations have been advanced to account for the observed variation in police behavior across physical space. Studies agree that the way a community setting shapes the exercise of discretion depends, partly, upon the actual problems of crime and disorder within that setting. Drawing on David Klinger's (1997) theory of social ecology, this dissertation examined (1) whether crime and deviance levels covary with police occupational outlooks at both the district and beat level of analysis, (2) whether officer attitudes display enough homogeneity within districts and beats that would allow us to call them a "norm," (3) whether crime and deviance levels vary inversely with vigor once the seriousness of the immediate offense is controlled, and (4) whether crime and deviance levels predict to vigor, with officer cynicism, distrust and role conception operating as the mechanisms through which such a relationship exists.;Bivariate analysis of the officer survey data indicated that occupational outlooks varied across district and beat contexts. While cynicism and distrust were associated with district and beat crime levels, the data finds little evidence which reflects a cynicism or role conception norm for either the district or beats where officers were assigned. Observational data analysis examined only those interactions with citizens who were classified as suspects, excluding suspects involved in traffic encounters. Using generalized ordered logistic regression, the findings indicate that district and beat crime rate does not significantly predict to vigor in the direction hypothesized. In some of the regression models estimated, officers were more vigorous in districts and beats with higher levels of crime, though the effects were quite modest. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research and theoretical development are discussed.;This dissertation used data drawn from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), a large-scale multi-method study of patrol officers and supervisors in two metropolitan police departments based on systematic observation and survey data. This analysis capitalized on the fact that observational data on individual officers' behavior could be linked with neighborhood level data as well as survey data measuring the observed officers' occupational outlooks.