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In light of recent calls to increase the diversity of America’s police, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of agency and leadership diversification on officer job satisfaction and reported perceptions of fairness within the organization, factors known to influence retention and performance.

A survey of 15,236 officers representing 88 agencies was used, as well as other agency- and community-level variables. Multi-level models were used to assess how these individual- and agency-level variables, including measures of diversification, affected job satisfaction and perceptions of fairness.

Diversification in agency leadership positions was found to improve perceptions of fairness among all officers, in addition to ameliorating some feelings of unfairness among African-American officers. Diversification of the sworn ranks, in comparison to the population of the community, however, was not found to significantly affect the outcome measures.

The study only examined the effects of diversification on officer perceptions. Future studies that link measures of diversification to citizen perceptions are needed to understand how members of the public respond to the image and characteristics of sworn personnel in their communities.

The results indicate the importance of retention and promotion of more diverse leadership in police agencies.

This study is one of the first to assess the effects of diversification in such a large sample of agencies of all types and sizes throughout the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the correlates of job satisfaction among civilian employees of law enforcement agencies, to assess how features of the policing workplace influence employee morale.

The data for this study were drawn from surveys conducted as part of the National Police Research Platform. In total, 472 civilians from 19 police agencies completed the survey.

The findings indicate that contentment with pay and benefits, lower levels of work-related stress, equality in the workplace, and feelings of acceptance were associated with civilian employee satisfaction.

The analyses presented here focusses on factors more unique to policing and did not include all of factors correlated with job satisfaction in past literature. Future research should address this as well as control for the effect of organizational-level factors.

The research identifies key factors in each of those categories that inhibit the effective incorporation of civilians into the workforce. It indicates that reaping the full advantages of civilianization is complex and requires attention to fundamental aspects of police organizations. How administrators deal with this reality will impact the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations in important ways.

To date, much of what has been written about the place of civilians in policing consists of descriptions of their numeric representation and discussions of the presumed advantages of hiring them in larger numbers. Less is known about how well civilians have been integrated into the policing workforce.

This study aims to bridge the police culture and the police employee well-being literature by demonstrating significant linkages between the two.

The authors examined the effects of culture on the well-being of officers in one police agency in the western United States during the summer of 2020. Using individual-level data, the authors model the association between officer perceptions of occupational culture and personal well-being for 125 sworn employees.

The results indicate that, for individual sworn officers, their adherence to elements of culture is related to well-being; specifically, burnout (BO) exhaustion, BO disengagement, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Additionally, the cultural attitudes of administration, and citizens in the population, are both consistent predictors of officer well-being.

This study provides an important linkage between the police culture and police well-being literature, which to date has been given limited attention.