Assessing the Perceived Image of Citizens about Romanian Police Forces

In a society which has become increasingly more complex, the role of Police forces tends to be versatile. Accordingly, lately, researchers gave a special attention to subjects regarding Police, and implicitly to the public image of the institution.

Generally, the police image is conceptualized based on three main categories: overall image, outcomes and process (Mastrofski, 1998). The overall image of police reflects perceptions, feelings and evaluations about the police in general. As Gallagher, Maguire, Mastrofski, & Reisig (2001) stated, this area includes various general descriptions and analysis of the confidence and trust in the police (e.g., Hough, Jackson & Bradford, 2013; Stanko, Jackson, Bradford & Kohl, 2012), satisfaction with the police (de ex. Ashcroft, Daniels & Hart, 2002; Skogan 2005), police performance in general (Cheurprakobkit, 2000; Cheurprakobkit & Bartsch, 2001), etc., all as indicators of citizens’ attitude toward police (Avjida, 2010).

Despite the abundant approach of the subject in foreign cultures, especially Anglo-American, Romanian scholarly literature doesn’t seem to be focused on the image of Romanian police forces. There are only a few studies that addressed the problem of perception or attitude toward Police or police officers (e.g. Constantin & Stoica- Constantin, 1999), and from which, mostly used opinion barometers as measurement methods (e.g. GfK Trust Index, 2011; Global Corruption Barometer, 2013).

The image assessment can be performed by several methods, each with various levels of operationalization and discriminative capacity (Chiciudean & Ţones, 2010). Although in this sector, most frequently were used the public opinion polls, there is a whole literature on the application of SDS in...

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... developed strategies for improvement and reinforcement of its place in community. The SDS can also be used for assessing the projected / desired organizational image, in order to establish the social distance in respect to the one actually perceived. Simultaneously, it can serve as a tool for the analysis in terms of the workers’ perceived and/or desired image of their organization.

A limitation of the study refers to the population sample. The participation was voluntary, based on the convenience of the respondents accessibility, without any sampling selection. For this reason we cannot generalize the results to the general population. Although the author considers his findings mitigate to some extent these shortcomings and the instrument being capable of providing an institutional image assessment tool, additional research is appreciated necessary.