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During the last decade Croatia and Poland underwent a period of major political transformation from communist regimes to democratic forms of government. Although their police forces function within similar political frameworks, their operational agendas are somewhat different. Due to the differences in social and economic environments, as well as the recent war in Croatia, the challenges the two police forces faced in the transition period varied substantially. This paper analyzes and compares the processes of change encountered by the two law enforcement agencies.

This paper aims to explore a critical component of the successful transition into a democratic police agency – the state of police integrity – among the Croatian police officers. The paper also analyzes the police officers' views about the community policing efforts.

The questionnaire administered to police officers in Croatia focuses on various forms of police misconduct, as well as the respondents' views about community policing. A random sample of 811 Croatian police officers was collected at the end of 2008.

The results of 2008 survey portray a more optimistic picture of integrity of the Croatian police than the results of the 1995 survey did. The respondents in 2008 seem to expect more serious discipline than the respondents in 1995 did. Furthermore, the code of silence – one of the key elements of police integrity theory – seems to be weakening. However, the evaluations of scenario seriousness remain relatively similar, indicating a common hierarchy of seriousness. Finally, the support for the idea of community policing is perceived to be much stronger at the top than at the lower levels of the organizational hierarchy or among individual police officers.

The 1995 and 2008 samples are random samples and thus do not constitute a panel data set.

The methodology can be utilized by police administrators to explore the contours of police integrity in their agencies. More specifically, the administrators can explore whether police officers know the official rules, how serious they evaluate police misconduct, what they think the appropriate and expected discipline is, and how willing they are to tolerate police misconduct in silence.

Prior studies of police integrity focused almost exclusively on one form of police misconduct – police corruption. Following the idea that police integrity encompasses the inclination to resist all temptations (and not just for‐gain ones) to abuse the rights and privileges, the questionnaire used in the study tests the police officers' tendency to resist a variety of temptations and thus yields a more comprehensive picture of police integrity. Furthermore, this methodology enables measurement of the changes in police integrity, which is particularly relevant for a police agency in transition or a police agency undertaking efforts to improve its state of police integrity.

This paper aims to provide an in-depth exploration of the code of silence in Korean policing and its relationship to perceptions of disciplinary fairness.

The authors separately surveyed 370 Korean police officers in 2008 and 356 Korean police officers in 2019. The respondents were asked to evaluate seven hypothetical scenarios measuring different types of police misconduct from police corruption to the use of excessive force.

The results demonstrated that the strength of the code of silence decreased over a decade. The code of silence seems to protect less serious examples of police misconduct more strongly than more serious examples of police misconduct. Furthermore, the extent of the code of silence and perceptions of discipline severity are closely related in situations in which the expected discipline is evaluated by officers as too harsh. When police officers evaluated the expected discipline as fair, they were less likely to adhere to the code of silence than when they evaluated the expected discipline as too harsh, providing support for the simple justice model. On the other hand, the results are mixed for comparisons of the code of silence among respondents who evaluated discipline as fair and those who evaluated discipline as too lenient.

This is one of few studies focusing on the potential changes in the code of silence over time and on its relationship with the perception of disciplinary fairness. South Korea has conducted a reform of the police (the Grand Reform) in the late 1990s and more recently enacted the new laws regulating police misconduct. This study relies on two independent surveys of the same population of police officersto empirically assesses potential changes resulting from these societal and organizational transformations.