The state of police integrity in Armenia: findings from the police integrity survey

The purpose of this paper is to study the extent and nature of police integrity in Armenia. It analyses police officer views about misconduct seriousness, appropriate and expected discipline, and willingness to report misconduct.

The respondents surveyed in this study are 468 Armenian police officers assigned to work in two large police departments, Yerevan and Lori. The overall response rate is 84 per cent. The respondents evaluated 11 hypothetical scenarios describing cases of police misconduct.

Although the majority of the respondents recognized and labelled the behaviour described in the scenarios as rule violating, a large proportion, in some cases even above 40 per cent, did not do so. The respondents’ evaluations of misconduct seriousness varied greatly across the scenarios. In only two scenarios, describing the acceptance of a bribe from a speeding motorist and the theft of a watch from a crime scene, the respondents thought that both the appropriate and expected discipline should and would be severe; in all of the other scenarios, the respondents expected and approved of either no discipline at all or quite lenient discipline. The code of silence appears to be strong among our respondents, protecting almost all behaviours described in the questionnaire. Unique to Armenia is the finding that the respondents estimated that they would subscribe to the code of silence to a larger extent than their fellow officers would.

Police officers included in the survey come from two police departments.

Police administrators interested in controlling the code of silence could apply the methodology used in this research to ascertain the extent and nature of the code beforehand. They could use the methodology to assess and compare the police officer perceptions of the discipline the agency is expected to mete out with the discipline meted out in actual cases and, if necessary, work on addressing the discrepancy between the perceptions and reality.

Although Armenia has been one of the former Soviet republics that purged the communist government even before the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the transition toward democracy has been troublesome and riddled with widespread accusations of various types of failures in police integrity. The methodology used in this research enables measurement of the nature and extent of police integrity at the present time and also, subsequently, monitoring and detection of the changes in police integrity, which is particularly relevant for a police agency in transition.