Police Integrity in Taiwan and Its Correlates

Police integrity is critically important because of the nature of police work: most police field work is under-supervised where unethical interactions could happen in low visibility, and in a non-invocation milieu. The aim of this research is to investigate police officers’ self-recognized integrity. We broke the new methodological ground by advancing a composite measure of police integrity based on the insight of (Stoddard, The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 59:201–213, 1968) and tested the extent of police integrity as being related to individual and organizational factors. Data were collected from Taiwan in 2020. We found that police integrity is associated with both individual and organizational factors beyond the demographic control variables of age and education. Specifically, self-control, anti-excessive-force attitudes, moral alignment with citizens, and internal procedural justice are found to be positively correlated with police integrity whereas being previously disciplined is negatively associated. We provide suggestions on how the police organization might exercise some influence on officer integrity based on the findings.