Police criminality and neutralization: an empirical study of court cases

Abstract

The prevalence of police deviance is a much-debated statistic and one that is often rife with problems. Based on 61 convicted police officers in Norway, court cases are analyzed in this paper to identify relationships between imprisonment days for convicted police officers and motive and brutality as determinants of each sentence. While there is a positive correlation found between severity of sentence and the extent of personal motive, there is a negative correlation between severity of sentence and the extent of brutality applied in policing. This is explained by neutralization theory in the paper.