Although governments try to create strict policies and regulations to prevent abuses, use of excessive force is still a problem for almost every country including Turkey. This study is intended to help Turkish National Police administrators to understand and prevent police use of excessive force. Studies on police brutality categorize three factors that explain why police officers use excessive force; these are individual, situational and organizational. In addition to brutality theories, job satisfaction literature is examined in this study to understand the use of excessive force. Job satisfaction is found to be related with burnout, turnover, stress, commitment, and performance. The impact of officers' attitude toward the criminal justice system and/or laws has not been tested widely. Police officers attitudes toward human rights laws are examined in this study to measure its impact on attitude toward use of excessive force. A secondary data collected in Turkey are analyzed by structural equation modeling which provides confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and causal relationships between variables. It is found that police officers' attitude toward human rights laws is a significant predictor of their attitudes toward use of excessive force. Job satisfaction and education level are the other significant variables affecting attitude toward use of excessive force. Based on the analyses of findings, educational and policy implications are posed for Turkish police administrators to better understand and prevent police use of excessive force.

Previous studies suggest that the organizational dynamics of police organizations and the nature of police work contribute to law enforcement stress, which in turn reduces job satisfaction and increases burnout. It is also well documented that undesirable organizational factors are more hazardous to the well-being of employees than are the stressors due to nature of police work. The present study examines whether, and to what degree, organizational and operational stresses in law enforcement are associated with job satisfaction, work-related burnout, and supervisor support, holding the effects of age, rank, education, gender, tenure, and shift type constant in the analysis. A total of 538 Turkish National Police (TNP) employees from seven cities in Turkey, comprising 407 regular police officers and 131 ranked police officers, completed the study survey. The influence of organizational and operational stresses on the work-related well-being of TNP employees as measured by job satisfaction and work-related burnout was analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM) under the theoretical framework of Kahn and Byosiere‟s (1992) causal theory. The results of the study indicate that TNP employees‟ perceived organizational stress has a statistically significant positive effect on work-related burnout and a negative effect on job satisfaction. The more TNP employees experience their organization as stress inducing, the lower their job satisfaction levels and the higher their burnout levels. Perceived operational stress of TNP employees was found to be significantly associated with their work-related burnout, but iv not with their job satisfaction. This study suggests that there is an indirect causal effect of both organizational and operational stresses on job satisfaction via supervisor support as mediator. Supervisor support fully mediates the relationship between operational stress and job satisfaction, and partially mediates the relationship between organizational stress and job satisfaction. After controlling the influence of several demographic variables, job satisfaction made a statistically significant contribution to predicting work-related burnout. This finding suggests that as job satisfaction of TNP employee increases, their work-related burnout decreases. The findings of the study revealed that among the six demographic variables, only education level of TNP employees and rank make statistically significant contribution to their job satisfaction levels. As rank and education level of TNP employees increase, their job satisfaction also increases. The predictor variables of organizational stress, operational stress, and supervisor support, along with education and rank collectively, explain 56 % of the total variation in job satisfaction. On the other hand, organizational stress, operational stress, job satisfaction, and supervisor support together account for 34 % of the total variance in work-related burnout. Overall, the findings of this study illustrate a need for internal policy reform and managerial change in how the executives of TNP organize their agencies and policies, since organizational stressors are the most prevalent factors determining the work-related well-being of TNP employees.