Echoes of silence: how police officers make sense of sexual harassment and the implications for individuals and organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The study aims to investigate how police officers make sense of sexual harassment (SH) and the potential implications for individual officers and their organization. Design/methodology/approach We used a sensemaking framework to analyze qualitative survey data collected at two different time intervals from members of a large North American law-enforcement agency that was grappling with complaints of SH. Findings Our findings illustrate the differing interpretations of SH, including why it persists. Whereas most officers perceived that SH was a systemic issue, some blamed victims or their harassers for perpetuating the issue. Further, reform efforts aligned with the “rotten apple” perspective were viewed as failing to address underlying issues. Originality/value Responses to internal reports of SH by policing organizations are often directed at reforming individuals as opposed to addressing systemic organizational factors. Part of the issue may be the reliance of police leaders on the “rotten apple” theory of police misconduct and assumptions about SH rather than the perspectives of organizational members. Our study illustrates the value of a sensemaking framework for helping create a shared understanding of the current state and developing more effective solutions to address SH. We discuss the implications of these findings for both research and practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".