Testing types: A review and test of police types

This paper offers a review and comparison of five major typologies of individual police officers, concluding with the suggestion that the five typologies contain a total of four major distinct types. An independent data set is then used in a secondary analysis to test empirically the existence of the four generic types. The test results provide nothing to support the notion that the four types actually exist; no empirical counterpart was found for any of the hypothesized generic types.