Resurrecting Individual Differences: Toward a Theory of Police Officer Behavior

The past century has produced abundant scholarship on policing. Glaringly absent, despite thousands of studies, has been an explicit attempt to build an interdisciplinary and causal theory of police behavior. Although theories about various aspects of policing exist, as a general rule they are cut-off from the insights of other behavioral sciences. There remains a need for a causal theory capable of explaining police behaviors and outcomes. We present a nascent theory of policing intended to provide a parsimonious, individual-level explanation of the complexities of policing. In the spirit of Popper, we offer “provisional” ideas that can be tested.