King publishes paper outlining theory of individual police officer behavior

William King, a professor of Criminal Justice, and co-authors recently published a paper, "Resurrecting individual differences: Toward a theory of police officer behavior," in the journal Crime & Delinquency.

The paper outlines a nascent interdisciplinary and causal theory of police behavior. Despite decades of research on police behaviors, such as arrest, use of force and service, there are currently only scattered hypotheses and data-points. There is no unifying causal theory of police behavior.

Leveraging the literature on gene-environment correlation, King and colleagues outline the process by which genetics, the selection of environments (micro and macro), intelligence and self-control may influence officer's behaviors. The paper also advances a more parsimonious conception of various police behaviors (the dependent variables) into two continuums (police action or inaction, and police deviance). The paper closes with hypotheses, which are derived from the proposed theory.

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