 So, hi, the title of my presentation is What Matters for the Police Code of Silence? And I co-authored this paper with Maki Harberfeld from John Jay, who couldn't be here, and Rob Peacock, who is sitting right there. So a few words about the talk itself. I'll start slowly by introducing some basic concepts related to police corruption, and in particular the Code of Silence. And because of the heterogeneity of the audience, members here progress into more challenging issues. So bear with me if there are things you've already heard before. There's going to be interesting stuff that's coming up. So I'll explain the theoretical approach and the methodology we use, and spend most of the time talking about the results, what we found. And in the end, I'll talk about policy implications coming out of our work. So what is this famous Code of Silence? Typically, when you ask people to think about the informal prohibition of reporting of misconduct of fellow officers, and it exists in each and every country, in each and every police agency, it's a part of the occupational culture of policing. So Frank Serpico, the most famous whistleblower in the history of the NWPD, and probably the American policing, before testifying at the NEP Commission, said, the problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers. We create an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears that this honest officer and not the other way around. So 20 years later, the Mollin Commission investigated corruption in the NWPD again, and they found that the Code of Silence is widespread and it affects both honest and dishonest police officers. And in fact, they call the Code of Silence the greatest barrier to effective corruption control. In other words, the issue is very important if you want to control misconduct. A couple of years ago, Weisberg and Greenspan did a nationwide survey of police officers, and they uncovered that about two-thirds reported police officers do not always report serious misconduct. And even if they want to report, they'll probably face a cold shoulder from fellow police officers. So there are serious challenges to studying police misconduct and the Code of Silence in particular. Usually witnesses at the scene and victims may like credibility. But credible witnesses like police officers do not want to talk about misconduct and the Code of Silence. And participants in the corruption section, like police officers and citizens, have no motives to talk. In fact, they have motives not to talk. And police chiefs may be unwilling to open their doors to researchers to begin with. So what do we do? We decided to focus, instead of focusing on police misconduct and facing the resistance that the judge described, we could flip the issue upside down. So we studied the opposite. In studying police misconduct, we studied police integrity. And I'll explain the theory and the methodology we developed. So speaking about the theory, Carl Klokers and I developed a theory of police integrity that has four dimensions. The first dimension talks about organizational rules and how they are made and understood by the police officers. So we can talk about the range of rules, including federal, state and municipal agents rules, such as the codes or ordinances. We can talk about police agency internal set of rules, police practices and procedures, and of course the code of ethics. The second dimension talks about corruption control techniques and what the agency is using to detect, investigate and discipline rule violations. And they range from very reactive ones to the very proactive ones. In a typical agency, most of the activities are reactive in nature. However, the early warning systems, an example of mechanism that has been introduced recently in many agencies, is an example of a proactive tool. And the third dimension of the theory, the most interesting for our purposes here, is the code of silence. And the focus is here, what is this code of silence? Can we measure it? And what the agency is doing to control it? So when you look at the academic writings about the code of silence, you can find many studies exploring this, either being field studies of different series of police officers. And also independent commissions have studied the code of silence. And the Christopher Commission, the NEP Commission, the Mon Commission, all of these commissions found that the code of silence is strong. And the last dimension of the theory talks about the influence of public expectations. In other words, what is the pressure that the society at large creates on the police department? And the department can be affected by the social, economic and the political environment in which it operates. So using this theoretical approach and the methodology that I'll describe in a minute, people have been studying police misconduct and police integrity and the code of silence across the world. So we know that potentially the code can vary across different forms of misconduct. In other words, potentially use of excessive force may be more likely to be protected than, let's say, police corruption. We know that the code varies across different forms, different seriousness of the same form so that the acceptance of gratuitous is more likely to be protected than, let's say, a theft from a crime scene. We know that the code varies across police agencies and within units of the same police department, different patrol districts may have different codes of silence. And also the supervisory status may be relevant, so potentially supervisors may have a narrow code and line officers. So now when you know the theory, how can we actually implement that and measure the code? So the traditional approach would ask direct questions about police officers involvement in misconduct or about other police officers involvement in misconduct. So it would have questions such as, how frequently does misconduct occur? Have you observed others engaging in misconduct? Have you engaged in misconduct yourself and have you reported misconduct by other officers? And you can imagine that police officers are going to be very resistant to answering such questions. And let me illustrate that with two examples. Fabrizio surveyed police officers who are attending the FBI academy and has them a couple of questions ranging from how much you like your food and your lodging all the way to, can you please provide examples of graft and corruption in your agency? So guess what? Police officers are very chatty about their food and lodging, but nobody provided an answer to a question about police corruption, okay? When we started the project, we were warned about a previous study by Martin and Knowles in which they wanted to get police officers to use about police misconduct. And we were told, listen, they started with a three state study and actually ended up with a two state study. Why? Because the police unions in Pennsylvania were so posing the study that eventually they had to drop Pennsylvania out of the project. And the same issue happened in Chicago as well. Chicago has very strong unions. And it's about one quarter of the police officers in Illinois. So eventually Chicago was dropped from the Illinois study as well. So this is where we were when we started the project. However, the organizational theory allows us to ask questions affecting opinions. So we can ask questions such as, do police officers know official rules? How serious they were with misconduct? Are they familiar with the disciplinary threat that the agency is making? They think the discipline is fair and are they willing to report misconduct? So all of these questions hopefully can be asked without such resistance as I described before. So this particular theory and the methodology that I'm going to describe have been used to survey over thousands of police officers in 28 countries across the world. And about two weeks ago, I've learned that three more countries have been added to the list, China, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. So we have two versions of the questionnaire. The first questionnaire talks about police corruption. And the second version of the questionnaire has 11 hypothetical scenarios, five of which describe police corruption, four talk about the use of excessive force, and two talk about different forms of police misconduct. So here's a taste of how scenarios look like. On the left-hand side, you have two scenarios dealing with police corruption. Scenario one talks about the acceptance of gratuators, and scenario three talks about an opportunistic theft. On the right-hand side, there are two scenarios dealing with the use of excessive force. Scenario seven talks about the verbal abuse. And scenario six talks about hitting a citizen. So after the respondents read each of those scenarios, they get the same seven questions. And we ask them, how serious do you evaluate this behavior? Do you think this is a violation of official rules? What do you think is the appropriate discipline? What do you think is the expected discipline that the agency is going to meet out? And are you willing to report this misconduct? So in order to minimize the likelihood they'll be identified and to increase the likelihood they'll provide truthful answers, we use a very limited number of demographic questions. So the data for this paper collected in 1314, and we posted a questionnaire on survey monkey. It was passed with protected. And the response rate was about 37%, which is relatively good for a one-time online survey. And we have responses from over 600 police officers from 11 police agencies in the Midwest and the East Coast. So when you compare the characteristics of our sample with the characteristics from the BJS survey of local police agencies, we conclude that they're relatively matched. So who are the respondents? Most of them are line officers, over three quarters are line officers, and they're experienced police officers. The majority have more than five years of experience. Most of them are assigned to patrol or investigation. And lastly, the most important question is, nine out of 10 said that they provided truthful answers when they fill out the questionnaire. And we eliminated questions provided by those who had answered negatively or simply skipped the question. So now when you know how to measure the code of silence, let's see what the results look like. And typically people say that the code of silence is this flat prohibition of reporting. But indeed, our results do not show this is the case. So here's the proportion of police officers who said that they will not report. And you can see very clearly that this is not a flat line, that the proportion of officers saying they will not report differs greatly from scenario to scenario. On the left hand side, we have scenarios, such as scenario one, which is acceptance of gratuities or scenario seven, a verbal abuse of citizen, where the majority or close to one half of police officers said that they will not report. On the right side of the graph, you have three scenarios, scenario 10, that's falsification of official documents, scenario three, that's an opportunistic theft, and scenario four, abuse of deadly force, where very few police officers said that they will not report. So we are far from a flat prohibition of reporting. So when we talk about the code of silence, we are talking about the code of silence, like there is only one code of silence. And to show that this is really not the case, we separate the data for supervisors and non-supervisors. And you can see again, that these are two distinct codes of silence. The statistical is significant in 10 out of 11 scenarios. And the largest difference is appearing in scenario seven. Here the difference is in out of, it's more than 30% between the code of silence for supervisors and the code of silence for line officers. The difference is somewhat smaller for more serious scenarios, such as scenario 10, where it's in the tens of percentages. And now the more complex question. So what factors are important for the code of silence? And we use the logistic regression to assess these factors. So if you're not familiar with the technique, this is statistical tool that allows us to see what the effect of one variable is, or one concept is, while you control for all of the other variables that are relevant. So we did logistic regression for each and every scenario on the table should look like this. So this is an example. And we put in individual factors, like the supervisor status, and most of the other factors are organizational factors. So rather than going over 11 tables and talking about better coefficients, I have a summary table for you that tells you what's important. So the most important variable concept that explains what the officers are willing to report is what they think that others would do. When they think that others would be willing to report, they say that they're more likely to report themselves. Of course, there are perceptions of how serious misconduct is irrelevant as well. All eight scenarios in which we included this variable, it turned out to be important. The more serious they perceive the behavior, the more likely they would say that they would report. We assume that the expected discipline is going to be relevant in all scenarios, but this really didn't turn out to be the case. It's only about two thirds of the scenarios. However, when you measure the effect of the fairness of perceived discipline, that was relevant in all 11 scenarios. And I think our largest surprise was with familiarity with official rules. We assumed that when the police officers know the rules, they're much more likely to say they would report, which really didn't turn out to be the case. And then we said, well, there is a somewhat moderate to strong correlation with perceptions of seriousness. So we ran the models again without including own seriousness into the models and then familiarity with official rules was important about one half of the scenarios. Out of individual measures, supervisors status was a critical one in eight out of 11 scenarios, that was three quarters of the scenarios. And supervisors were more likely to say that they would report than line officers. So what are the policy implications from our research? This theory and the methodology that we developed can be used, first of all, to measure the contours of the code in the agency. In other words, you can see what behavior is or is not covered by the code. It can also help to detect potential changes, assuming that you want to introduce a new rule, new policy into department. If you do pre and post survey, you can see how effective this new policy is. It can also help with the control efforts. In other words, if you measure the code, we can tell you where the code is the strongest and where the code is the weakest, where is the first time or place where it should attack the code. And it can also help you assess where the police officers have an accurate knowledge of the code of silence. And in the sample that we have, they have an overinflated perception of what the code of silence looks like. And we can also talk about the implications for concepts which directly related to the code of silence, such as whether police officers evaluate misconduct as serious, whether they know official rules, whether they accurately estimate what discipline is going to be met out by the agency, and whether they perceive discipline to be as fair. So all of these concepts are relevant for anybody who wants to control misconduct and the code of silence. So in other words, this is something that should be of interest to the audience members here. And I'm looking forward to your questions. So when you get home, if you have any more questions about our project, I would be very happy to answer your questions. And here's my address. You also have it in the conference book. So I'll stop here.