Confidence in Their Craft: Officer Experience and Its Impact On Self-Efficacy Beliefs

Policing is often described as a craft in which officers develop their own working style through a process of apprenticeship and time spent handling unique citizen interactions. For police, experience is thought to be integral in nearly every facet of their role including developing suspicions, making discretionary decisions, defusing potentially dangerous situations, or using coercion. With that being said, the study of police experience itself has received scarce attention and a number of limitations are present within the work that does exist. The current study advances police research on multiple fronts. First, it centers on reframing police experience in a more precise manner, with special attention paid to identifying and detailing how shift, crime area, duty assignment, and training experiences accumulate and vary across officers. Second, it examines the impact of police work experiences on officers’ perceptions of confidence. Third, an additional qualitative approach is included to provide context for how work experiences impact officers’ confidence in performing job related tasks. Using data collected from a large metropolitan police department located in the western portion of the United States, the results add much to what is known about how police experience is acquired throughout a career and how it is related to officer self-efficacy. Independent variables such as officer tenure, the number of shifts an officer has worked in their career, the completion of additional in-service training, and duty experience were all significant predictors of increased confidence in performing different service-oriented, order-maintenance, and law enforcement tasks. To explain these findings, the officers’ qualitative responses largely focused on how exposure and repetition at handling unique situations made these experiential factors important to the development of confidence. Finally, these results are translated into a number of policy recommendations and avenues for future research.