Additional Pattern Seven: Veteran Hubris and Rookie Mistakes

A pattern evident from the cross-case analysis is that long-service police, particularly those who have not acclimated themselves to social, legal, or technological changes, are more likely to evince misconduct in a police-civilian interaction that is documented by user-generated online video. On the other end of the service scale, rookie police, those in mentor/mentee relationships with long-service police, and undertrained ‘special police’ also appear to be more likely to commit misconduct in a police-civilian interaction. Police with a few years of experience, but less than the seven years before hubris and complacency are likely to arise, represent a very small minority in the examined cases. The same pattern of police time-in-service appears in the variables of police treatment of the videographer.

The constraints of the present research do not allow the development of this observed pattern into a robust theory.

Considering the number of cases in which this unanticipated pattern appeared, there would seem to be fertile ground for quantitative survey and qualitative interview research on police attitudes toward civilian cameras and user-generated online video, particularly addressing the possible influence of level of education and years of service. The products of such research may prove particularly valuable to police administrators as guides to the identification of officers in need of retraining before their patterns of misconduct become embarrassingly public.