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Rethinking the Measurement of Officer Experience and Its Role in Traffic Stop Searches

The role officer experience plays in shaping behavioral choices has received considerable attention. Officer experience has most often been captured by measuring years of service in policing literature. Thus, the field’s understanding of how officer experience shapes behavior choices is limited because years of service are not experienced monolithically. The current study employed multivariate, multilevel models to test three research hypotheses based on existing theoretical explanations of police behavior and psychology literature to more fully explore the influence of officer experience on discretionary search behavior. The results indicate that years of service provide an incomplete understanding of how experience motivates behavior in the traffic stop search context. A more complete understanding requires accounting for aspects of exposure to certain situational characteristics, activities undertaken, and work performance, suggesting that failing to incorporate multidimensional operationalizations of experience limits our ability to fully understand the influence of officer experience on decision making.