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We explore the relationship between urbanicity and police officers’ perceptions of changes in their reactive and proactive work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using the 2021 survey of 1,262 Croatian police offices (436 police officers from a large urban community, 471 police officers from small towns and 155 from rural communities), we examine the perceived changes in their reactive activities (e.g. responses to the calls for service, arrests for minor crimes) and proactive activities (e.g. community policing activities, directed patrols) during the peak month of the pandemic compared to before the pandemic.

The majority of police officers in the study, regardless of the size of the community where they lived, reported no changes before and during the pandemic in reactive and proactive activities. Police officers from urban communities and small towns were more likely to note an increase in domestic violence calls for service. Police officers from urban communities were also more likely than the respondents from small towns and rural communities to report an increase in the responses to the disturbances of public order. Finally, police officers from small communities were most likely to observe a change in the frequency of traffic stops during the pandemic.

This study is the first one to explore the differences in perceptions of COVID-19-related changes in reactive and proactive police activities in a centralized police system.

This study examines the effects of diffuse support for the police, specific support for the police, experience with the police, and demographic characteristics on citizens' own expressed willingness to report police misconduct. The authors surveyed immigrants from Croatia who now reside in Germany and Ireland to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relative role these factors play in regard to immigrants' willingness to report misconduct in Croatia.

The study, based on a survey of 358 Croatian immigrants to Germany and 226 Croatian immigrants to Ireland, utilizes multivariate logistic regression models that assess factors affecting the respondents' expressed willingness to report police misconduct in their homeland and their current countries of residence.

The authors' multivariate models reveal that diffuse support for the police (e.g. confidence in the police and perceptions of widespread police corruption) plays a strong and significant role in explaining the respondents' willingness to report misconduct in the authors' initial models. However, the direct effect of the diffuse support completely disappears in most of the models once scenario-specific police integrity measures (e.g. views of expected discipline severity and estimates whether police officers would report misconduct) are included as well. With the exception of age, other demographic characteristics and contact with the police were not systematically and significantly related to the respondents' willingness to report.

This is the first empirical study to provide an in-depth exploration of various factors associated with the citizens' willingness to report police misconduct.

Though contemporary police organizational behavior scholars often limit their measure of organizational justice to just supervisory procedural justice, this study examines how the additional dimensions of supervisor trustworthiness and peer procedural justice compare with procedural justice in their role shaping police outcomes.

A survey of 638 police officers in Zagreb, Croatia, was used to regress three separate dimensions of organizational justice on key officer attitudes toward their duties.

The authors found that supervisor trustworthiness and peer procedural justice were the dominant predictors of officers' rule compliance and trust in the public.

The findings suggest that police scholars and practitioners seeking to better understand the role of officer judgments on resisting agency reform should consider the precedent in corporate behavior research to specifically test the unique roles of multiple components of police organizational behavior on policing outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to test the theory of police integrity, particularly its fourth dimension, on a centralized police agency and to assess the degree to which levels of police integrity are related to the characteristics of the larger environment.

In 2008, a stratified representative sample of 945 Croatian police officers from ten police administrations evaluated 11 hypothetical scenarios describing a range of various forms of police misconduct. The questionnaire measures officer views regarding scenario seriousness, appropriate and expected discipline, and willingness to report the misconduct.

Bivariate analyses show that police officers’ evaluations of seriousness differed across categories of police administrations for more than one-half of the scenarios. Multivariate analyses reveal that, once organizational predictors are entered into the models, community characteristics remain significant predictors of seriousness evaluations for only a few scenarios.

The analytical strategies were limited by the number of police administrations in the country.

The results indicate that levels of police integrity in large, centralized organizations vary across units and that the characteristics of the communities the police are a contributing factor to these differences. At the same time, organizational characteristics carry substantial weight.

Prior studies of police integrity focussed on the organizational aspects (the first three dimensions of the theory); the present paper extends the literature to ascertain the importance of the larger environment and its characteristics for levels of police integrity (the fourth dimension of the police integrity theory).