Police record-discretion as misconduct in South Korea

Despite a substantial number of police corruption studies founded on Klockars and colleagues' scenario-based vignette survey (2004), little attention has been paid to record-discretion as a type of police misconduct. Goldstein (1977) notes that police corruption is sometimes manifested in insidious forms. Record-discretion is worth investigating because despite its low visibility it potentially affects public confidence in the entire criminal justice system. Using data from South Korean police officers with investigative assignments, we examine the etiology of record-discretion among detectives by focusing on both individual officer characteristics and his/her perceptions of organizational correlates. Significant predictors included investigators' levels of expertise and prior injury experience, prosecutor supervision, media attention, and rule effectiveness. These relationships, however, vary across types of assignment, supporting evidence for the existence of two cultures in policing.