Field Supervisor Behaviour and Officer on Duty Personal Business
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| Author | Richard R. Johnson |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijps.2008.10.3.89 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Field supervisor behaviour and officer on
duty personal business
Richard R. Johnson
Department of Criminal Justice, University of Toledo, HH3000, Toledo, OH 43606, USA.
Tel: (419) 530 2142; email: Richard.Johnson4@utoledo.edu
Received 30 May 2007; accepted 20 November 2007
Keywords: police supervision, supervisor modelling, supervisor contact,
police patrol
Richard R. Johnson is an assistant professor of
criminal justice at the University of Toledo in
Toledo, Ohio. He holds a doctorate in criminal
justice from the University of Cincinnati and pre-
viously had worked as a police officer. His
research interests include the first line field
supervision of police officers, police–citizen
interactions, and the policing of domestic
violence
A
BSTRACT
Police patrol officers generally operate with little
direct supervision of their work activities, enabling
them to abuse their unassigned patrol time by
engaging in personal business actions. The present
study sought to measure the influences of super-
visor modelling and supervisor contact on the
amount of time which patrol officers spent on
their own personal business-related activities. The
findings suggest that the less time supervisors
spent on personal business, the less time officers
also spent on these types of activities. The find-
ings also suggest that the more face-to-face contact
supervisors had with their subordinate officers in
the field, the less time these officers spent on
personal business. Finally, the degree of influence
face-to-face contacts and supervisor modelling had
on patrol officers was limited.
INTRODUCTION
Workplace loafing, or conducting personal
business when one is being paid to perform
duties for one’s employer, is a problem that
costs the private sector in the United States
billions of dollars annually in lost productiv-
ity (Christina, 1994). One national survey
found that office workers waste about 18
per cent of their work shift time by sleep-
ing, reading the newspaper, playing video
games, surfing the internet, or making per-
sonal phone calls. Another survey found
that 67 per cent of private sector employees
admitted using their employer’s computer
to access websites for personal reasons on a
daily basis (Rem, 2000).
Similar abuses occur among public sector
employees. A report by the Internal Rev-
enue Service revealed that more than half of
the employees of this federal tax collection
agency used government computers to
access websites for personal use, to include
shopping online, gambling, and viewing
pornography while being paid by taxpayer
dollars (Weisman, 2001). Police officers
have also been found to engage in personal
business while on duty. Every major obser-
vational study of the police conducted in
the US has encountered officers engaging
in personal business while on duty such as
reading, sleeping, running personal errands,
or making personal phone calls (Famega,
2005). Usually these activities are unob-
served by the general public but occasion-
ally these activities make it to the front page
International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume 10 Number 3
International Journal of Police
Science and Management,
Vol. 10 No. 3, 2008, pp. 339-348.
DOI: 10.1350/ijps.2008.10.3.89
Page 339
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