Understanding Police Culture
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Understanding Police Culture
Van Maanen tries to explain the concept of self-deprecation by three different social contexts: the military, workplace, and college, which affects a person’s self-esteem. According to Van Maanen, as a person grows older, one becomes more emotionally stable, and so do the values and attitudes of a person (Cordner, 2017). He also outlines that individuals are more likely to be subjected to change if they are introduced into new organizations. One of the biggest problems that face the police today is their relationship with the civilians.
Therefore understanding the relationship is very vital to ensure a good relationship between the police and other people. When a person is young, in this case, the police officers they are emotionally unstable and have not also the values and beliefs of a young person may be influenced easily. As a result, they end up messing their relationship with the public or instance by harassing persons and charging them with mistakes that they have not committed (Charman, 2017). The behavior can be attributed to emotional instability and the lack of a set of values to uphold. They are also moved a lot from one state to another, for instance, and therefore they are subjected to new environments.
There is a relationship between the concept of self-deprecation and situational discretion in that the self-esteem of a police officer will, in turn, affect the situational discretion. Different police officers will interpret situations differently, which may be determined by the self-esteem of a person. When a police officer is young, for instance, they are inexperienced and may, therefore, draw firearms in a situation that could have been solved without force. They may try to use force to since they may feel undermined and therefore end up making the wrong decisions.
References
Charman, S. (2017). Being a Police Officer: Policing Cultures. In Police Socialisation, Identity and Culture (pp. 127-167). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Cordner, G. (2017). Police culture: Individual and organizational differences in police officer perspectives. Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management.