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Abstract

In the wider spectrum of Taiwanese public service spheres, the herculean services and dedication of its committed Police personnel have long been recognized, respected, and admired. However, regrettably, question marks concerning their conduct, discipline, and abuse of power have surfaced on intermittent occasions. A classic example that lingers in the public memory is the bribing of Taiwanese video game companies to some unscrupulous elements of the police department, in the closing decades of the 20th century that triggered public outrage and called for scrutiny concerning serious lapses in the discipline and conduct of Police personnel. This research paper endeavors to understand, analyze and address some of those issues based on empirical data on the police personnel of certain specific work zones/areas taking into account holistically both the sentenced police officers vis-à-vis the law-abiding police officers. This module looks into and sieves through available data for seven critical variables, including their degree of variation through the Identification and Analysis Method to develop a Predictive Model on Police Ethics and the important factors that affect Police Ethics. Concretely based on the integrated research, it is proposed that this Predictive Model has good applicability as well as accurate predictive ability in addressing the core issues that affect Police Ethics. It is hoped that through this Early Warning Predictive Model—all the stakeholders that are Policy and Decision-makers, Regulatory Police Agencies but more importantly the Police personnel themselves would effectively address the criticality of the issues that affect the Police Ethics so as to undertake competent and effective measures to erase/lessen the menace and provide an early rehabilitative care/assistance to build a strong, constructive and visionary Taiwanese Police Force to meet the challenges of 21st century and beyond.

Keywords

Undisciplined policemen behavioral patterns behavioral management predictive model discriminant analysis

Introduction

The current research endeavors to establish a model for police officers’ conduct to prevent the occurrence of incidents/events arising out of indiscipline, immoral/bad habits that are capable of harming the standing, repute, and morale of police personnel. The research studies conducted by Gershon et al.¹ are a clear pointer towards various issues that lead to work stress among the police and its consequent fallouts on the professional standing of its personnel.

Thinking through this article, anti-corruption law enforcement is what the government should do. The outstanding performance of moral cases may not necessarily win the people's trust and affirmation of the government. What people want to see is not the results of subsequent investigations by the government, but to further reflect on why the corruption case is so happen. The people's pursuit is to treat the symptoms rather than the root cause. Therefore, seeking practical actions and gaining the people's trust in law enforcement is a top priority for the government's integrity departments.

Research background and objectives

Unbridled and creepy indiscipline in the law enforcement and regulatory agencies in particular and polity, in general, has the innate potential of causing negative effects such as—government policy deviations, reduction in cumulative public expenditures, corrupt and inefficient civil services, low and slumberous administrative responses with increased government-civilian disputes—eventually leading to reduced government prestige and misplaced social resources. Most importantly, it can lead to rampant unhealthy practices in society. Therefore, there is an urgent need to understand the various facets of corruption and the issues related to it so as to deal firmly and decisively to establish and uphold a clean government image, as exemplified by Bayley.²

The purpose of this research endeavor is multifold. Essentially, it seeks to understand the actual historical data on record concerning the instances/events related to indiscipline in the police personnel, analyze critically the factors behind those and then propose a predictive model that has good applicability as well as accurate predictive ability in addressing the core issues that affect the police ethics:

To discuss critically the important factors related to the issue of indiscipline and the type of cases involved.

To take into account and analyze the empirical data of a certain area/zone to identify the factors and thereby construct a predictive model for forecasting well in advance.

To help ready and provide requisite supervision units; basis for pre-judgment; and pre-control and responsive management measures.

Literature discussion

In the following paragraphs, relevant literature has been reviewed to understand the factors that affect Police morale, its symptoms and characteristics, ways to predict, mitigate and prevent the occurrence of such cases on the basis of a dynamic theoretical Predictive Model based on the discriminant analysis.

Documents related to police officers’ conduct

Based on comprehensive research, scholar Ji³ brings forth and summarizes the criminal characteristics as noted below: dereliction of duty and corruption regulations. The criminal law's dereliction of duty mainly regulates the illegality of civil servants in performing their duties. Compared with the law of corruption and crimes, which emphasizes the illegality of civil servants to obtain benefits, the two The values of concern are different, but when public servants commit crimes for their duties, most of them use illegal performance of their duties to obtain illegal benefits, and the crimes of civil servants regulated by the Corruption Crimes Regulations also limit those related to their duties. The above crimes are generally referred to as civil servants and their accomplices (see Table 1).

Table 1.

The characteristics of crime.

Characteristic	Definition
Official business	The perpetrator is a civil servant or has the status of being entrusted to perform official duties who commits a crime using the convenience of his/her position.
Professional	It is a kind of intellectual crime and the facts of the crime are not easy to be found out/traced. The offender has a certain degree of professional knowledge, and outsiders cannot know the professional field of business.
Repetitive	It has the characteristics of repeated implementation and the continuity of repeated implementation.
Hidden	Crimes are highly concealed. That is the number of crimes is high and they are rarely reported. The perpetrator is attached to normal official activities and uses identity and knowledge to cover them, and it is not easy to be discovered.
Complexity	The violations of laws and regulations as also of the widely regulated matters which have scope for their violations. Use legal procedures to cover illegal activities and abuse the public power granted by the state.
Contradictory	The perpetrator and the victim are closely related; And, they are reluctant to make it public because of criminal prosecution and bribery. The victim may be pursuing his goals and refuse to report to avoid a criminal investigation.
Profitability	The amount of crime victims is often measured in high figures, which is highly profitable. For example, the specifications tied after the bid is awarded, the considerable income obtained from the materials, etc., are highly profitable.
Damaging	Most of the crimes occurred because the offender abused his/her power or was in hand-in-glove with the unscrupulous manufacturers, which is highly damaging. Such as colluding with the purchasing agency to change the design, acknowledging the bad, etc., in addition to the public funds of the discipline, to provide help in the future, profit and damage.
Abstraction	Its legal benefits appear to be relatively abstract, causing significant losses of public funds, which are not obvious signs. If a certain target object is eagerly made to cause the loss of public funds, it is disapproving, and it is often mistaken as a wrong move.
Low insight	The public has a low understanding of corruption and its crimes; And, condemns the principles of fairness and justice. Discipline crimes are generally highly educated and knowledgeable and are the envy of the general public. They often do not know their crimes, or even cited them as a model for learning.
Intractability	Most of the crimes have a higher education experience; have considerable status and are not easy to detect. These were all discovered by the relevant units. They were unable to cite specific criminal evidence due to the image of the agency or the environment of the main picture.

Source courtesy: Ji³ [Collated with current Authors’ research].

Factors affecting police discipline

Shi⁴ critically acclaimed research compiles describes and sums up both the external as well as the internal environmental systems that affect the discipline of the police personnel in the following ways (see Tables 2 and 3).

Table 2.

Affect external environmental system.

Factor	Definition
Legal factors	The administrative regulations or operating procedures of public agencies fail to integrate with social fluctuation that affects administrative efficiency.⁵
Political factors	The government promotes various major measures or decisions, which greatly affect the interests of industrial and commercial enterprises.⁶
Economic factors	The income of the middle class in society is equal, but under the free competition of the social economy, the income is different.⁷
Cultural factors	In terms of traditional culture and national conditions, if there is a slight overstep, it is related to the formation of the issue of morality.⁴

Source courtesy: Shi⁴ [Collated with current Authors’ research].

Table 3.

Affect internal environmental system.

Factor	Definition
Organizational climate	Product failures become true. Tolerance conceals subculture.
Administrative procedures	Administrative efficiency is low. Excessive discretionary power.
Administrative assessment	Performance appraisal is not pragmatic. The level of supervision is not solid.
Executive leadership	Leadership decision-making deviation. Failure to choose a supervisor carefully.
Executive leadership	Lower-grade and narrow promotion. Insufficient retirement protection.

Source courtesy: Shi⁴ [Collated with current Authors’ research].

External environmental system

See Table 2.

Internal environmental system

See Table 3.

Personal attributes

According to Muscari,⁸ personal and individual idiosyncrasies are the key factors leading to indiscipline in the police personnel, and those personal/idiosyncratic factors are described in Table 4.

Table 4.

Personal attributes that affect policemanship.

Factor	Definition
Cognition	To make the police your profession, you need a clear understanding and direction, and what you can do or not.
Psychological	Human behavior is mainly governed by psychology, which rationalizes moral behavior and then self-hypnotizes.
Will	Have a firm will and police ethics in your industry, and be able to avoid the temptations in your surroundings.
Character	Low laws and ethics and low loyalty to service organizations are prone to ethical incidents.
Family	Alienation from the family and irregular time; the relationship between men and women is inappropriate; expenditure cannot sustain a livelihood; moral incidents are prone to occur.

Violation of discipline by the police often involves crimes on duty, which are mainly civil and discipline; police conduct crimes are relatively serious cases in the national administrative system. The people's hope for the police is not only whether they can solve a case when a case occurs, but also whether the quality of the police can be improved, and a living environment for the people to live and work in peace and contentment can be provided for the people.

Relevant literature for identification analysis

Noted below are some of the select important works that discuss the issues under reference and point towards important criteria that are helpful in the identification analysis (see Table 5).

Table 5.

Scholarly literature on identification analysis.

Author (year)	Research results
Chen and Huang⁹	Identify, analyze, predict and establish a credit loan model.
Huang¹⁰	The method of Discriminant Analysis is used to predict patient loyalty.
Zhao¹¹	Find out the key indicators for prediction and conduct Discriminant Analysis.
Li¹²	It lies in the early warning system, which can detect potential economic weakness and formulate early countermeasures.
Liu¹³	Both Discriminant Analysis and Logistic Regression Analysis have good predictive ability.
Shi⁴	Use typical and step-by-step analysis to establish a discriminating function with known disciplinary factors.
Morgan and Griego¹⁴	Use the Social Science Statistical Software Package (SPSS) to process the collated quantitative data. Descriptive statistics using frequency and percentage are used to analyze quantitative data, while Chi-square test statistics are used to test research hypotheses.

Source courtesy: Shi⁴ [Collated with current Authors’ research].

Research methodology

In the current research endeavor, methodically and critically several aspects of the available relevant historical data were sieved through to understand the complexities involved in understanding the core and peripheral issues related to indiscipline in the police personnel, as outlined below:

Data collection

The requisite and relevant data collection process undertaken is shown in the below noted schematic diagram (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Research architecture diagram. Source courtesy: compiled from the outcomes of current research.

Research scope and objectives

The empirical data utilized in the current research endeavor is gathered from authentic sources ranging in a period from January 2016 to December 2017. It relates to two categories of Police personnel from a certain area/zone of Taiwan, totaling 14 cases: 1. Police officers committing duty crimes or corruption and; 2. Law-abiding police personnel.

Research design

The research design was carefully contemplated and intended to thoroughly understand insightfully the demeanor of the police personnel based on critical independent variables, such as age, education, rank, position, seniority, bad habits, and the service area complexity of the police personnel

A = f (X 1, X 2, X 3, \dots, X k)

where A is the categorical dependent variable; 0, disciplined; 1, undisciplined Xk is the interval independent variable; age, education, rank, position, seniority, bad habits, the service area complexity.

Research results

The outcome of this focused research endeavor is based on analyzed sample data related to duty or corruption-related crimes against the law-abiding police personnel of a certain area/zone of Taiwan, totaling 14 specific cases.

Research variable descriptive statistics

According to the research analysis under reference, the sentenced police personnel are averagely among the older ones—those with lower academic qualifications and ranks. More specifically, it is the criminal police who are susceptible to problems of ethics. It is older among them who face more ethical problems and it was noticed that most of those who come under this category have more than one vice. The study also clearly exemplified that the majority of those police personnel (working in the complex service areas), who have bad habits are more prone to moral and ethical problems (see Table 6).

Table 6.

Descriptive statistics of sentenced police personnel.

Change direction	Average value	Standard deviation	Minimum	Maximum
Sentenced officer
Age	46.71	3.45	42	53
Education	14.57	2.507	12	20
Official rank	6.29	0.488	6	7
Position	0.64	0.078	0	1
Seniority	22.86	5.146	13	30
Bad habits	1.57	0.535	1	2
Service area complexity	4.29	4.499	0	10

Source courtesy: Compiled from the outcomes of current research.

As illustrated in the following table, the law-abiding police personnel are on an average 38 years old and are graduated from a professional police training college. Those with higher ranks are less likely to have problems with the discipline as also those with the Administrative Police. It is also observed that the younger the seniority—their living habits are the simpler; the area is simpler with fewer moral problems (see Table 7).

Table 7.

Descriptive statistics of law-abiding police personnel.

Variable	Average value	Standard deviation	Minimum	Maximum
Law-abiding police personnel
Age	38.86	9.924	25	54
Education	16.57	3.409	12	20
Official rank	8	1.414	6	10
Position	0	0	0	0
Seniority	13.86	11.127	3	31
Bad habits	0	0	0	0
Service area complexity	2.86	3.934	0	10

Source courtesy: Compiled from the outcomes of current research.

Correlation analysis

When the absolute value of the correlation coefficient reaches 0.7–0.8, it is highly correlated; if it is above 0.8, it is highly correlated (see Table 8).

Table 8.

Correlation analysis of research variables.

	Age	Education	Official rank	Position	Seniority	Bad habits	Service area complexity
Age
Pearson related	1	−0.246	0.496	−0.357	0.956**	0.378	0.278
Significance		0	0.152	0.105	0.001	0	0.168
Education
Pearson related		1	0.691	0.871*	0.491	−0.493	−0.453
Significance			0.347	0.001	0.62	0.037	0.005
Official rank
Pearson related			1	0.642	0.314	−0.458	−0.55
Significance				0	0.132	0.05	0.021
Position
Pearson related				1	0.741	−0.417	−0.53
Significance					0.25	0.07	0.026
Seniority
Pearson related					1	0.852**	0.312
Significance						0	0.013
Bad habits
Pearson related						1	0.148
Significance							0.001
Service area complexity
Pearson related							1
Significance

Source courtesy: Compiled from the outcomes of current research.

According to Table 9, this study used the KMO sampling appropriateness test The KMO value is 0.835, which also indicates that the analytical effect is valuable. The Chi-square value is 50.445, and the significance is 0.000 <α = 0.05, indicating that it is suitable for follow-up research (see Table 9).

Table 9.

Personnel Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett certification.

KMO sampling suitability		0.835
Bartlett sphere test	Approximate Chi-square distribution	50.445
	DF	21
	Significance	0.000

Discriminant analysis

According to Table 10, the overall Wilks’ Lambda value is 0.132, and the significance is 0.013 <α = 0.05 reaching a significant level (see Table 10).

Table 10.

Eigenvalues and Wilks’ Lambda value of personnel discipline model.

Function	Intrinsic value	Variable %	Accumulate %	Positive quasi-correlation
1	6.586a	100	100	0.932
Function test	Wilks’ Lambda (λ)	Chi-square test	Degree of freedom	Significance
1	0.132	17.224	7	0.013

Source courtesy: Compiled from the outcomes of current research.

It can be noticed from the above analytical observations that the Police personnel who have been under excessive pressure continually for a long time are more prone to vices and fall into bad habits such as drinking, pornography, and borrowing (see Table 11).

Table 11.

Structure matrix.

Variable	Function
Bad habits	0.875
Official rank	−0.341
Age	0.223
Seniority	0.218
Education	−0.141
Position	−0.112
Service area complexity	0.771

Source courtesy: Compiled from the outcomes of current research.

Thus, using the discrimination probability function to perform discriminant analysis successfully helped predict possibilities of moral problems, their degree, and acuteness. The ethics of machine learning is an important tool.¹⁵ And, our current research endeavor demonstrates and furthers the idea of the ethics of machine learning, its applicability as well as utility.

Predictive model

This study uses SAS (Statistics Analysis System) statistical analysis software to construct the police officer's predictive style model for this study. This study will describe the predictive model in detail as follows.

DATA D1;

INPUT NO Discipline age education rank position year habit area;

CARDS;

1 0 39 20 9 0 5 0 0

2 0 33 20 8 0 5 0 0

3 0 54 14 7 0 31 0 5

4 0 41 20 10 0 19 0 0

5 0 32 16 9 1 9 0 0

6 0 25 12 6 0 3 0 10

7 0 48 14 7 0 25 0 5

8 1 45 14 6 0 22 2 0

9 1 48 14 7 0 25 1 10

10 1 45 14 6 0 22 2 5

11 1 46 12 6 0 23 1 0

12 1 53 14 7 0 30 2 0

13 1 42 20 6 0 13 1 5

14 1 48 14 6 0 25 2 10

15 . 35 16 8 0 10 1 0

16 . 48 14 6 0 25 1 10

17 . 43 16 10 0 19 1 0

18 . 42 16 8 0 18 3 0

19 . 47 14 6 0 22 1 5

20 . 33 14 7 1 11 1 0

21 . 41 12 7 1 18 1 0

PROC PRINT;

TITLE1 ‘ Forecast of Police Discipline Model ‘;

TITLE2 ‘ Data required for identification analysis ‘;

VAR Discipline age education rank position year habit area;

ID NO;

PROC CANDISC ANOVA;

TITLE2 ‘Verification of Discriminant Function–Application of the Regular Law‘;

CLASS Discipline;

VAR age education rank position year habit area;

PROC DISCRIM LIST;

TITLE2 ‘Prediction of Disciplinary Issues–The Application of Tacit Method‘;

CLASS Discipline;

VAR age education rank position year habit area;

ID NO;

PRIORS ‘0’ = 0.95 ‘1’ = 0.05;

RUN;

Conclusions

The current research study under reference successfully used the available relevant empirical data—effectively employing the discriminant analysis—to explore the main factors that are linked to police indiscipline and then build a solid premise for a predictive model to address the issues related to morality, ethics, and indiscipline.

This study unambiguously revealed that a number of unhealthy lifestyle habits and the complexity of the service area are important factors affecting the issue of morals. The nature of police work stands on a delicate premise that is interdependent on both external and internal systems; and, when there is excessive work pressure, it often leads to and makes them susceptible to various bad habits. Another important point to be noted here is the salary of grassroots’ level police personnel which is generally inadequate and unfavorable. As they grow older, they are not promoted and are unable to hold on to themselves with the discipline. Consequently, such cumulative reasons cause and have all the potential to develop into cases of collective corruption and gross indiscipline.

Recommendations

These empirically derived research results reveal that while implementing discipline-related policies and performance duties, there are ways and means to reduce the chances of potential corruption offenders. To prevent the occurrence of unethical practices in the vitally important police organization system—policy and decision-makers, inspectors and regulators, institutions delving with crime prevention mechanisms can make use of the discriminant analysis as also this predictive model to accurately study those sections of the police personnel who are susceptible to bad habits/lifestyle and work in more complicated service areas. Such precautions are absolutely necessary not only in carrying out healthy management of the police forces but most importantly in firmly placing an early warning system in the national interests of the vibrant Taiwanese polity and society.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Kuang-Tai teacher encouraged to participate in this research.

Authors’ contributions

LK and YL designed this experimental study and wrote the manuscript. LK and MX conducted the statistical analysis. The three authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

ORCID iD

Ryi-Kui Yu

Author Biographies

Kuang-Tai Liu, Department of Industrial Management, Chung Hua University, assistant professor, Expertise: production and operation management, quality management, enterprise resource planning, etc.

Ryi-Kui Yu, PhD Program of Technology Management, Chung Hua University.

Hsin-Yun Ma, PhD Director & Associate Professor, Police Administration Dep, Taiwan Police College. Expertise: Public Administration.

References

Gershon

Lin

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Bayley

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Shi

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. Credit scoring and rejected instances reassigning through evolutionary computation techniques. Expert Syst Appl 2003; 24: 433–441.

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. Research on the differentiation of loyal patients among the main competing hospitals in Taitung area. Kaohsiung City, Taiwan: Institute of Public Health, Kaohsiung Medical University, 2004.

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. Research on the prediction model of dementia . Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Institute of Management Science, Yishou University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2004.

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. Apply Bayes’ theorem and discriminative analysis to establish a financial crisis early warning system. Hsinchu, Taiwan: Department of Electrical and Control Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 2007.

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. Using financial ratios to construct a financial crisis early warning model for backdoor listed companies – a comparison between identification analysis and logistic regression analysis. New Taipei City, Taiwan: Department of Business Administration, Shishi University, 2008.

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Discriminant analysis predicted undisciplined policemen

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Research background and objectives

Literature discussion

Documents related to police officers’ conduct

Factors affecting police discipline

External environmental system

Internal environmental system

Personal attributes

Relevant literature for identification analysis

Research methodology

Data collection

Research scope and objectives

Research design

Research results

Research variable descriptive statistics

Correlation analysis

Discriminant analysis

Predictive model

Conclusions

Recommendations

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Authors’ contributions

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Availability of data and materials

ORCID iD

Author Biographies

References