ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contexts that shape police officers’ compliance/noncompliance at meso (organizational) and micro (individual) levels associated with macro-(system) level directives, namely the U.S. Department of Justice’s program designed to identify and remedy systemic violations of unlawful police behavior. Various contextual factors affect the extent to which officers comply with these directives. This chapter focuses on how officers translate compliance in-form directives at the micro level into norms of compliance in-practice, which results in some degree of noncompliance with the formal directive. To do so the authors explore the set of societal, organizational, individual, and situational contexts that are reflected in the discourse and dialogue among officers as part of their shared police subculture. In their analysis the authors examine how these behaviors can be explained as patterns of neutralization and moral disengagement, which illustrate the nested nature of formative contexts of police resistance practice reform.
