ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the estimates of seriousness of scenarios describing a rarely studied subset of delinquency—police delinquency. It describes cases of police corruption, involving typical forms of corruption, such as theft, bribes, and kickbacks, and some forms of behavior that may not necessarily be criminal but may be a violation of departmental policy. The chapter discusses the seriousness of these forms of police misconduct based on the estimates of seriousness from two groups of respondents with no experience in policing and those with a great deal of experience in policing. It provides a crosscultural comparison of these issues using questionnaires from police officers and students in two countries—the United States and Croatia. The sample of Croatian police officers is a stratified national sample that includes a substantial proportion of police officers in the entire country. Samples of police officers and students from the United States and Croatia evaluated the seriousness of a range of cases of police misconduct.
