Understanding and Managing Sexual and Other Misconduct Among Police Officers

Dear Colleagues,

We invite authors to contribute submissions to a Special Issue examining the current landscape of police misconduct, including its drivers, associated mechanisms for accountability, and preventative actions. Recent inquiries, most notably the Angiolini Report into police culture, vetting, and institutional failures, have highlighted deep-rooted structural issues that extend beyond individual wrongdoing. These findings have intensified public scrutiny, renewed debates on legitimacy and trust, and exposed critical limitations in areas such as training or organisational governance. Despite frequent calls for police practices to be improved, in reality, little is known about the nature of police misconduct and how it can or should be addressed beyond a reactive approach.

Therefore, this Special Issue seeks contributions, primarily interdisciplinary ones, that enable us to gain a more holistic understanding of issues surrounding police misconduct (including sexual and other misconduct). We welcome contributions relating to how police misconduct is understood today and how it manifests and how organisations aim to prevent it and respond to it. This can include empirical studies, theoretical frameworks, comparative analyses, and practice- or policy-oriented work. We encourage early-career researchers and practitioners to submit papers to this Special Issue. Our aim is to bring together scholarship which can illuminate pathways towards more transparent and just policing systems.

Dr. Katarina Ozcakir Mozova
Dr. Martin O'Neill
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.