Mise en lumière des écarts d’attitudes face à la légitimité de la police et l’emploi de la force à divers stades de la formation policière : démystification du processus de socialisation des policiers

The thesis suggests studying the variations in attitudes toward police legitimacy and the use of force for in-training police students at distinct phases of police initial training at the Police Academy. Several researchers and many police officers attest that the police craft is solely acquired and learnt on the street and, therefore, the training provided at the Police Academy is pointless. Yet, is this really so? Could it be that the training provided by the Police Academy triggers such gradual attitude changes that they go unnoticed, while contributing to preparing the recruits to perform the police line of work? These questions underlie this thesis, specifically in regard to police legitimacy and use of force in the sense that the contribution of the police training would be unveiled if in-training police students more advanced in the study program have more positive attitudes toward police legitimacy and are more favourable to police use of force. Undeniably, the literature on police legitimacy is extensive. However, authors generally adopt a unidirectional point of view where police legitimacy equates to citizen perceptions of police. Rather, it is advocated here that an interactionist and dialogic approach is better suited to understand police legitimacy. The latter is based on the premise that citizens’ perceptions of police legitimacy ensue from the outlook that patrol officers have on the legitimacy of their institution. In that case, police training is considered a professional socialization process which acts as a police legitimacy transmission channel leading to the conformity to police culture.  The thesis tackles this research topic with a macrosociological approach supported by a quantitative methodology based on a repeated cross-sectional research design. Precisely, the analytical strategy consists of mean comparisons of attitudes toward police legitimacy and use of force scores at different stages of the police training curriculum. As a first step, data were gathered from a sample of 1 494 future police officers in training in Quebec, Canada. Then, in order to rule out the alternative hypothesis that attitude score fluctuations between groups at different stages of the training could result from a maturation phenomenon generalized to all youth in the phase of emerging adulthood (i.e. 18-25 years old), the thesis includes a dimension of comparison with the general population of the same age group by taking into account the attitude scores of a sample of 601 students from other study programs. In accordance with the three specific objectives of the thesis, results show that, along the police training: 1) attitude scores of in-training police students more advanced in the curriculum are more positive and more divergent from those of the students from other study programs than these attitudes for freshmen, reflecting the impact of training in the development of the perceptions of police legitimacy in those on the path to serve as patrol officers, 2) attitude scores of the group of in-training police students more advanced in the curriculum are more homogenous than those of more novice groups of in-training police students, which suggests the adherence to a specific professional culture, and 3) in-training police students in the senior phase display a greater disconnection between their attitudes toward police legitimacy and attitudes toward police use of force compared to their more junior colleagues, in the sense that their attitudes towards police legitimacy are less strongly predictive of their attitudes toward police use of force. This last result sheds light on the development of critical judgment. All things considered, the thesis concludes that the worth of police initial training is far from vain; it strikes as being responsible for subtle and gradual attitude changes that can prove important to police work.

Keyphrases: police, recruits, training, professional socialization, police culture, use of force, legitimacy, power-holder legitimacy, homogenization