By Rebecca Plimmer

What drives a police officer to be violent? Could it be a result of situational factors and the demands of the job? Or could it be that certain officers have a disposition towards perpetrating and endorsing violence? To further understand this, we must first consider what violent beliefs are held by police and what factors are driving them.

Police violence is a substantive issue for UK police. We can see this by looking at recent figures from the Home Office showing an 8% rise in use of force incidents between 2022-23. The rate of these incidents varies depending on the type of force, force area, and the demographic characteristics of those against whom force is used; with 13% of use of incidents being against those of Black/Black British ethnicity. Several recent high-profile murder cases have further illustrated the prevalence of police violence, including the case of Sarah Everard in 2021 and the 2016 case of former football player Dalian Atkinson, both of whom were murdered by serving UK police officers. These cases are just some of the many that have sparked national enquiries
into UK policing.

"Recent enquiries include the Angiolini Report (2024) and Casey Review (2023) following the death of Sarah Everard and the Baird Inquiry (2024) which highlights officers’ negative treatment of women and girls particularly within custody, all of which highlight police sexual violence and misconduct."

Academic research on police violence has focused largely on officers’ "use of force", capturing any act or threat of physical violence towards a citizen. However, we can see from reported cases and official reviews and inquiries, that there are other types of police violence, including sexual violence (where officers abuse police force and authority for sexual purposes), and racial violence (where an officer’s threats and acts of violence are directed towards racial and ethnic minorities). These types of violence have been examined independently, but their frequent co-occurrence and devastating consequences on the mental health of both victims and perpetrators begs the question, should they be considered together? In my ongoing PhD research ‘Understanding individual differences in police attitudes about violence and decision making’ at the University of Warwick, we collectively investigated attitudes and behaviours which tapped into these different forms of violence (i.e., attitudes for support of the use of force, violent ideations, rape myth acceptance, endorsement of racist beliefs and recent self-reported use of force), and surveyed 389 individuals involved in policing including serving officers who were sampled from 11 UK police forces, and periphery police groups such as retired and former officers and policing students, where the latter were recruited from 39 universities and colleges across England and Wales.

Firstly, we found that these attitudes existed among those involved in policing, and in most cases, they were correlated with one another. But what is driving this violent ideation? Demographic variables (e.g., sex, age, race, marital status, length of service) have dominated the knowledge base on police violence, but evidence on most of these demographics has produced mixed findings. Therefore, we turned towards psychological variables that have previously been found to increase a person’s propensity for violence and endorsement of violent attitudes. One potential answer could be dark personality traits such as psychological entitlement, and what is known as the dark tetrad, which is comprised of four other malevolent personality traits including: Machiavellianism (manipulation, cynicism), narcissism (vanity, egocentrism), psychopathy (lack of empathy, and antisocial behavior) and sadism (enjoyment of cruelty). The latest results from our first study suggest:

"dark personality traits were present among those involved in policing, and that they better predicted violent perpetration and attitudes than demographic variables."

For instance, the dark tetrad was revealed to predict more support for use of force and recent self-reported use of force among serving officers, whereas psychological entitlement predicted greater endorsement of racist beliefs and general violent ideations. Furthermore, adherence to rape myths was predicted by the dark tetrad and psychological entitlement, with the only statistically significant demographic finding being that serving officers were more supportive of using force compared to periphery police groups which consisted of retired and former officers; student officers and new recruits; police staff and civilians; special constables; cadets; and policing students. This is likely due to the nature of the job whereby serving officers are at the forefront of danger and adversity and have practical lived experience of using force.

Alternatively, answers could also lie in well-established psychological theories of aggression and violence. For example, moral disengagement theory argues that violence is a result of psychological mechanisms people use to disengage from their moral standards, whilst intrasexual competition theory, an evolutionary based framework, suggests violence to be a result of same-sex competition for resources (namely romantic partners). Applying this to the current research context, police violence will likely occur as result of an officer competing with a suspect for status, where they will devalue the suspect using intersexual (i.e., self-promotion enhancing one’s desirable attributes) and intrasexual (i.e., competitor derogation, reducing their rival’s desirability using indirect or direct aggression) tactics. For males these tactics will center around physical dominance where they will attempt to enhance their own dominance by going to the gym and engaging in dominant sports or hobbies such as boxing and will derogate the physical dominance of their rivals using verbal and physical aggression (i.e., comments and jokes about how weak their rival is, and engaging their rival in real or play fights). For females these tactics will center around physical attractiveness where they will attempt to enhance their own attractiveness by appearing well groomed and wearing makeup and will reduce the attractiveness of their rival by spreading rumors about their fidelity and sexual promiscuity. In our recent preliminary results, we found that as standalone theories moral disengagement and intrasexual competition predicted most violent outcomes. But when both theories were added in with other demographic covariates, intrasexual competition theory lost its explanatory power with moral disengagement being the only significant theoretical predictor for most violent outcomes. These same results also highlighted the contribution of several significant demographic predictors, where compared to periphery police groups, serving officers were more supportive of use of force. Likewise, race was revealed to be a significant predictor of rape myth acceptance, where those belonging to the non-white racial group had greater rape myth acceptance than those who were white, and for recent self-reported use of force, male officers were found to use more force within the last 12 months than female officers.

Overall, the research has illustrated that those in policing endorse violent attitudes and perpetrate violence (recent self-reported use of force), which psychological risk factors (dark personality traits) and social cognition theories (moral disengagement theory) can explain. Implications of this work include the possible inclusion of psychometric measures assessing dark personality traits and moral values into current UK police recruitment and vetting procedures, as well as them being considered in equality and diversity training initiatives as we now know they facilitate discriminatory attitudes (i.e., rape myths and racism).

"Ultimately, it is hoped that by UK police forces having this knowledge of psychological factors and theories that they will be better equipped to identify, manage and support officers at risk of violence, which will go towards the rebuilding of public trust and confidence in policing."

In the coming months, we hope to expand upon these results further in our final study, where we will be using vignettes to investigate how suspect characteristics (i.e., suspect sex, race and physical attributes including dominance and attractiveness), and situational characteristics (i.e., type of force), influence police attitudes towards a colleague’s hypothetical use of force (i.e. their level of acceptance, seriousness, and willingness to report).

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