Police Culture and Police Leadership

Abstract

Despite the wealth of literature focusing on police culture, there is little sense of an ‘established’ position on how this concept relates to the issue of police leadership – either in the traditional sense of qualities associated with the senior ranks or of qualities associated with all ranks. In respect of the former, this is because, as Reiner (1992) noted, the growth in research surrounding policing mainly concentrated on explaining the values and behaviours of the lower ranks of the organisation. Indeed, whilst some literature touches upon the nature of this relationship between police culture and leadership (see, for example, Marks, 2007 on the relationship between police culture, leadership and unionism), or explores a particular aspect of it (see, for example, Cockcroft, 2014, on the relationship between police culture and transformational leadership), the relationship has not been more fully articulated. To date, therefore, there has been insufficient attention paid to the identification of a broad explanatory context to facilitate our understanding of this area.