Is policing becoming a tainted profession? Media, public perceptions, and implications

• Author: Deepshikha Chatterjee,Ann Marie Ryan
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2471
• Date: 01 September 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Is policing becoming a tainted profession? Media, public

perceptions, and implications

Deepshikha Chatterjee

1

| Ann Marie Ryan

2

1

Department of Psychology, Salem State

University, Salem, Massachusetts, USA

2

Department of Psychology, Michigan State

University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

Correspondence

Deepshikha (Dia) Chatterjee, Salem State

University, Department of Psychology,

352 Lafayette St., Salem, 01970

Massachusetts, USA.

Email: dchatterjee@salemstate.edu

Funding information

Charles P.and Lind a A. Thompson Endowment,

Michigan State University; College of Social

Science, Michigan State University; Michigan

State University for the Charles P. and Linda

A. Thompson Endowment

Summary

Stigmatized professions are those where physical, social, and/or moral taints are

applied. Stigma theorists hold that stigma is socially communicated and changes over

time, but it is unclear if stigma content can be applied to those who are seen as pow-

erful. Two studies examined how the impact of sociopolitical discourses on policing,

a profession that carries legitimate power, on the tainting of the profession and dis-

trust in policing. In an examination of archival news media clips on policing (N= 200),

results show that media coverage over time (between 2011 and 2016) has used a

more negative tone in discussing police–citizen interactions, and these findings var-

ied by conservative versus liberal media. Importantly, across media sources, taints

were ascribed to policing. In a second survey study, individuals directly ascribed

taints to policing (N= 169). Relative to other jobs, policing was categorized as a per-

vasively stigmatized job (i.e., high frequency and strong potency of taints were

applied). It was also found that those who discussed media stories tended to distrust

police more. Implications for efforts to recruit, select, and train officers and to

improve police–community relations are discussed; findings may also generalize to

other public and community facing professions.

KEYWORDS

diversity, media, policing, stigmatization

1|INTRODUCTION

Policing in the United States has increasingly been under scrutiny.

Seemingly routine traffic stops and minor violations have somehow

escalated into fatalities. Indeed, cases such as those of Sandra Bland,

Michael Brown, Walter Scott, and Philando Castile (The Wall Street

Journal, 2016) have sparked a national debate on matters of policing,

especially its intersection with race. Cell phone and dash-cam videos

of police–civilian interactions range from mistreatment, rudeness, and

incivility to deadly knee-jerk reactions. In the year 2017 alone, reports

on a pattern of civil rights violations in Chicago, Baltimore, and Colo-

rado police departments were released (Department of Justice,

2017a), and a number of officers were charged or indicted over civil

rights issues (Department of Justice news, 2017b). Sociopolitical

movements have arisen recently related to policing: the Black Lives

Matter, n.d. (http://blacklivesmatter.com) movement to shed light on

how policing in United States disproportionately and deleteriously

impacts African Americans and other persons of color, with the Blue

Lives Matter and All Lives Matter movements originating as backlash

against Black Lives Matter. The movements are founded in diametri-

cally different philosophies, are differentially covered by liberal and

conservative media, and are symptomatic of a polarized, divided coun-

try (Pew Research Center, report on sociopolitical polarization, 2014).

These divisive attitudes and beliefs about the police and their role in

society have been at the forefront of national conversations and have

important implications for the profession itself.

Although there is work on negative views of policing (e.g., Nix &

Wolfe, 2017; Schafer, Huebner, & Bynum, 2003), researchers have

not yet examined stigmatization in the policing context. Despite this,

prior conceptual work on dirty work hints that policing may now be

Received: 13 June 2019 Revised: 29 June 2020 Accepted: 1 July 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2471

606 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2020;41:606–621.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

perceived as a stigmatized profession (Kreiner, Ashforth, &

Sluss, 2006). It is incumbent on organizational scholars to study the

shifts in public attitudes about professions such as policing that seek

to serve large segments of the population. Indeed, stigma is socially

communicated and is susceptible to change with times and social

events (Andreyeva, Puhl, & Brownell, 2008; Goffman, 1963;

Meisenbach, 2010; Smith, 2007), and people tend to show a confir-

mation bias in dealing with those with stigmatized identities (Darley &

Gross, 1983). Prior work on the dialogic model of police legitimacy

suggests that a vicious, self-perpetuating spiral of distrust may have

the potential for undermining the efficacy of any individual-level inter-

ventions directed primarily at the police officers (e.g., implicit bias

training; Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012), as well as on efforts to attract

and retain quality police officers (Haley, 2017; Maciag, 2018;

Malone, 2016; Wester, 2017). That is, it is important to study percep-

tions of policing as a stigmatized profession because those percep-

tions can have negative consequences for daily interactions between

the police and the public (Nix & Pickett, 2017; Nix & Wolfe, 2017).

Two studies are presented to examine whether or not policing

has come to be viewed as a stigmatized profession (see Figure 1). This

question is explored from the perspective of both media discussions

of policing (Study One) as well as how these media discussions mani-

fest in public perceptions to impact distrust in policing (Study 2). Fur-

ther, in Study 1 we are specifically interested in assessing whether

media portrayal of policing as tainted has shifted in recent years. We

ground our work in the dirty work literature (Kreiner et al., 2006)

which posits that certain jobs and their members—for example, gar-

bage collectors, prison guards, and morticians—are stigmatized and

considered “dirty”(Hughes, 1958; Kreiner et al., 2006). Hughes (1958)

conceptualized occupational stigma in terms of social, moral, and/or

physical taints, later defined by Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) as:

(a) physical taints exist for work in conditions deemed dangerous or

noxious or when the job requires one to handle offensive or dirty

things (e.g., dead bodies, blood, and garbage), (b) social taints exist if

working with groups viewed negatively and/or vilified by society

(e.g., prisoners and prostitutes), and (c) moral taints exist if working in

domains morally questioned by society and regarded as sinful

(e.g., prostitution and lying to achieve key outcomes). Ashforth and

Kreiner (1999) state that not only are the boundaries between social,

moral, and physical taints not always clean, but also that they can shift

with changes in society's views of what is or is not considered “dirty”;

our studies aim to examine whether this shift is occurring for policing.

Our study provides several contributions to theory and practice.

First, establishing whether or not policing is a stigmatized profession

has important implications for determining the most efficacious

approaches to solving the current crisis of distrust in policing. In line

with literature on cultivation theory (Gerbner & Gross, 1976) and dirty

jobs (Kreiner et al., 2006), the focus here is on the question of

whether physical, social, and moral taints are ascribed to policing in

media discussions, and if so, how they interrelate. In terms of practical

implications, understanding the types of taint that may apply to polic-

ing can provide a lens on strategies for trust repair between policing

and the public, as well as broader applicability to stigmatized individ-

uals in professions with public interaction (e.g., customer facing jobs;

Mikolon, Kreiner, & Wieseke, 2016).

As a second contribution, the paper provides insight into the the-

oretical debate over the link between stigmatization and power. Some

researchers claim that stigmatization is only possible for groups with

lower power (Link & Phelan, 2001; Parker & Aggleton, 2003). The lit-

erature is unclear as to which perspective is supported, that of the

stigma researchers who claim that for any group to be stigmatized, a

prerequisite is to have low power, or the perspective of the dirty work

scholars that even powerful professions can and do get tainted. Dirty

work literature is currently silent on whether or not power is a bound-

ary condition for professions to be stigmatized; our studies are an

effort to empirically assess if a profession with power could

FIGURE 1 Visualizing Study 1 and

Study 2

CHATTERJEE AND RYAN 607