EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
When enforcing society’s laws, police officers are entrusted and endowed with special powers that can have profound influence on its citizenry. Officers can, and occasionally do, abuse their authority, violate rules and laws, set a poor example for others, and exploit their position for personal gain. It is critical, therefore, that police officer integrity problems are minimized through whatever means possible, including early identification
and prevention. During the National Symposium on Police Integrity held in 1996, sponsored by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), a number of initiatives were proposed to foster and maximize integrity in the police culture. These included, among other things, examining entry-level screening and hiring processes to ascertain reliable predictors of integrity related behavior, and studying the relationship between psychological screening data and future integrity-related problems to identify reliable predictors.