TOWARD A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF POLITICIZED POLICING ATTITUDES: CONFLICTED CONSERVATISM AND SUPPORT FOR POLICE USE OF FORCE

• Published date: 01 November 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12092
• Author: JASMINE R. SILVER,JUSTIN T. PICKETT
• Date: 01 November 2015

TOWARD A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF

POLITICIZED POLICING ATTITUDES: CONFLICTED

CONSERVATISM AND SUPPORT FOR POLICE USE OF

FORCE∗

JASMINE R. SILVER and JUSTIN T. PICKETT

School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, SUNY

KEYWORDS: public opinion, policing, use of force, political ideology, conflicted con-

servatives

America is in the midst of an extraordinary public debate about police policy. “Con-

flicted conservatives,” who are symbolically conservative but operationally liberal, may

have a disproportionate influence on policy making. Specifically, conflicted conserva-

tives may be more likely to vote across party lines because they attend more to utilitar-

ian concerns about social conditions and government performance than to symbolic

issues. Prior criminological research, however, typically has treated conservatives as

a homogenous group. We use data from the General Social Survey to explore the ex-

tent and correlates of global and situational support for police use of force among

conflicted conservatives and other political groups. The findings from logistic regres-

sion models estimated with two analytic samples (N =11,119 and 2,069) indicate that

conflicted conservatives’ attitudes about police use of force are distinct from those of

“consistent conservatives” who are both symbolically and operationally conservative,

but do not reflect a unique consideration of utilitarian concerns over symbolic beliefs.

Two other notable findings emerged: 1) Racial attitudes predicted support for police

use of excessive force invariably across political groups and 2) public support for ex-

cessive force increased substantially during the first decade of the twenty-first century,

sharply contrasting trends in general punitive sentiment.

Criminologists increasingly are devoting theoretical and empirical attention to under-

standing public attitudes toward police practices such as racial profiling and the use of

force (e.g., Higgins, Gabbidon, and Jordan, 2008; Johnson and Kuhns, 2009; Pickett,

2015). This line of research has great political relevance because of the ongoing public de-

bate about both the appropriate level of police power and the situations in which police

officers should exercise their authority. For example, in the past year, several incidents

involving the use of deadly force by White officers against Black citizens have resulted

in public controversy and protest, such as the “Black Lives Matter” movement. In recent

years, politicians, criminal justice professionals, and members of the public have debated

the efficacy and constitutionality of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2015.53.issue-4/issuetoc.

Direct correspondence to Jasmine R. Silver, School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany,

SUNY, 135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY 12222 (e-mail: jrsilver@albany.edu).

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12092

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 53 Number 4 650–676 2015 650

CONFLICTED CONSERVATISM AND SUPPORT FOR POLICE 651

policy, which encouraged officers to question and search “suspicious persons” but that

largely resulted in stops of Black and Hispanic citizens (New York Civil Liberties Union,

2013). Likewise, during the “Occupy” protests beginning in 2011, public outrage erupted

over cases of alleged police brutality (Knuckley, Glenn, and MacLean, 2012). In Arizona

in 2010, public debate surrounded the Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which provided police

with increased powers to investigate immigration status, arrest and report noncitizens,

and assist in their removal (Santa Ana and Gonz´

alez de Bustamante, 2012).

Extant evidence demonstrates that public sentiments, and in particular changes in pub-

lic sentiments (see Stimson, 2004), can have an important influence on criminal justice

policy (Enns, 2014; Nicholson-Crotty, Peterson, and Ramirez, 2009). With regard to the

reach of police authority, popular attitudes can “act as a vehicle of social control, restrain-

ing police use of force” (Flanagan and Vaughn, 1996: 126). Research assessing the nature

and correlates of citizens’ support for law enforcement policies and practices is therefore

of critical importance.

As Herbert Blumer (1948) emphasized long ago, however, the public is not homoge-

nous in its influence on public policies. That is, some groups have a larger impact on

legislative outcomes than others. In particular, recent research has identified a group of

Americans known as “conflicted conservatives” whose opinions, because they are poten-

tially driven by concerns that are only weakly rooted in ideology, may have a dispropor-

tionately large impact on policy (Ellis and Stimson, 2011, 2012; Stimson, 2004). These

individuals are symbolically conservative but operationally liberal, meaning that they

identify as conservative but tend to have liberal spending preferences (Stimson, 2004).

They are thus “cross pressured by their symbolic attachments and their principled be-

liefs” (Popp and Rudolph, 2011: 810) and, as a result, may cast votes across ideological

lines. By contrast, individuals who are consistent liberals or conservatives—those who

have a symbolic identity that aligns with their operational preferences—are likely to vote

in a more consistently ideological manner (Stimson, 2004). Conflicted conservatives may

therefore commonly be responsible for shifts in public opinion and, as such, for any asso-

ciated policy changes (Ellis and Stimson, 2012; Stimson, 2004).

A key theoretical argument (Stimson, 2004) is that relative to other political groups,

conflicted conservatives may have distinct views about social policies that are driven more

by utilitarian concerns, which include perceptions of social conditions and government

performance, than by symbolic (or expressive) beliefs, which describe deeply held ideo-

logical worldviews. We provide the first test of this hypothesis in the context of popular

attitudes toward policing. Because of its political salience, our analyses focus on support

for police use of force. Specifically, we use data from the General Social Survey (GSS)

to compare global and specific views about police use of force among conflicted conser-

vatives and other political groups. In the following sections, we review the literature on

conflicted conservatism, as well as relevant utilitarian concerns and symbolic beliefs that

may differentially influence attitudes toward police use of force among conflicted conser-

vatives and members of other ideological groups. Next, we detail our methodology and

present the findings deriving from our analyses.

CONFLICTED CONSERVATISM AND PUBLIC POLICY

That a discrepancy exists between how Americans view themselves politically and how

favorably or unfavorably they actually evaluate liberal and conservative policies is a rel-