Police recruit narratives and publicly oriented vocabularies of motive
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14613557231182055 |
| Author | Jesse SG Wozniak,Norman Conti,Patrick Doreian |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Research Articles |
Police recruit narratives and publicly
oriented vocabularies of motive
Jesse SG Wozniak
West Virginia University, USA
Norman Conti
Duquesne University, USA
Patrick Doreian
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; University of Pittsburgh, USA
Abstract
Although who chooses to become a police officer and why they do so is pivotal for understanding policing, few studies
explore recruit motivations. We help to fill this research void through analysis of open-ended narratives penned by police
recruits during the academy in a large rust belt city explaining why they want to become police officers, supplemented
with qualitative follow-up interviews conducted with randomly selected participants. Of the existing studies on police
recruit motivation, nearly all use fixed-response surveys of researcher-selected answers. Despite our respondents
being completely free to use their own words, their motivations demonstrate a striking similarity to the findings of pre-
vious literature. These stated motivations of altruism and community concern also stand in stark contrast to the public
behaviors of police. We suggest this consistency in stated motivations and disconnect with public behavior evinces a pub-
licly oriented vocabulary of motive in which police recruits are attempting to voice the “appropriate”reasons for joining
the force.
Keywords
Police, police training, vocabularies of motive
Submitted 24 May 2022, Revise received 21 Apr 2023, accepted 22 May 2023
Introduction
Following a year of uprisings across the United States
demanding police reform and accountability, as well as
the 6 January 2021 storming of the United States Capitol
by a crowd that contained dozens of current and former
law enforcement members (Ben-Menachem, 2021), there
is increasing interest in who is comprising our nation’s
police forces. At the same time, police departments across
the United States are struggling to recruit new officers
(Smith, 2022). As such, there may be no point in
American history in which so many people are interested
in who decides to become a police officer and why. The
motivations of those who chose to enter an institution
invested with such awesome powers of arrest and use of
force seems intuitively like a topic that would flourish
within the wide field of policing studies.
Notwithstanding the significant social impact of under-
standing who chooses to enter the field of policing and
why they chose to do so, there is surprisingly scant scien-
tific literature on the subject. Over the past decade there
have been only a handful of published studies examining
Corresponding author:
Jesse SG Wozniak,West Virginia University, 311 Knapp Hall, 29 Beechurst
Avenue, Morgantown, WV 26501, USA.
Email: jesse.wozniak@mail.wvu.edu
Original Research Article
International Journal of
Police Science & Management
2023, Vol. 25(4) 448–458
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/14613557231182055
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