Positive public perceptions are a critical pillar of the criminal justice system, but the literature addressing them often fails to offer clear advice regarding the important constructs or the relationships among them. The research reported here sought to take an important step toward this clarity by recruiting a national convenience sample to complete an online survey about the police in the respondent’s community, which included measures of the process-based model of legitimacy and the classic model of trust. Our results suggest that although both are predictive, the models can be integrated in a way that allows the strengths of each model to address the weaknesses of the other. We therefore present this model as a first step toward an Integrated Framework of Police Legitimacy that can meaningfully incorporate much of the existing scholarship and provide clearer guidance for those who seek to address these constructs in research and practice.

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The recent protests regarding the state of policing in the United States clearly demonstrate that how the police do their job creates a salient potential for harm to the public. This study applies a multidimensional paradigm of risk perception to quantify evaluations of police-caused harm. Using data from a national (U.S.) convenience sample ( n = 1,890) that oversampled individuals who self-identified as black or Muslim, we tested whether these evaluations vary systematically (using confidence intervals), whether they covary with police legitimacy (using structural equation modeling), and the extent to which that covariance differs by demographic status (using multiple groups structural equation modeling). Our results suggest that black and Muslim individuals evaluate police-caused harm differently than do majority group members (white and Christian) on most, but not all, of the measured dimensions. We also find that those evaluations are predictive of trust and provide evidence of some level of consistency across communities.

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