Don’t Know, Don’t Care, Don’t Want, Don’t Dare: An Explorative Study into Predictors of Police Officers’ Support for Reform to Prevent Ethnic Profiling

Abstract This study examines how participation in learning activities on controversial topics can be increased. Specifically, we focus on police officers’ willingness to participate in activities to prevent ethnic profiling, a highly charged topic within the police organization and society alike. As with other controversial topics, not all police officers embrace such initiatives. In this paper, we explore individual (e.g. gender, service years) and work-related antecedents (e.g. psychological safety) of police officers’ support for reform training in two different studies. In the first explorative study, we interviewed 13 police professionals who volunteered to lead an ethnic-profiling reform in their units. The interview data confirmed the importance of the variables extracted from the literature and identified two additional factors: job satisfaction and political orientation. In total, we identified four sociopsychological constructs and five individual variables that we deemed relevant for further analysis. A second, quantitative survey study with 281 police officers tested the relationship between the identified constructs and police officers’ support for reform. The results showed that being male, warrior-minded, orientated towards the political right, and being dissatisfied with one’s job all corresponded with less support. Open text analysis revealed that police officers typically avoid reform activities for four key reasons: lack of awareness of potential bias (don’t know), indifference towards the topic (don’t care), opposition to the reform (don’t want), or fear of negative evaluation from colleagues (don’t dare). These findings highlight the importance of psychologically safe, informative, and appealing learning environments in reform strategies to prevent ethnic profiling.