This is a repository copy of When is policing fair? Groups, identity and judgements of the procedural justice of coercive crowd policing.

Contemporary research on policing and procedural justice theory (PJT) emphasizes large-scale survey data to link a series of interlocking concepts, namely perceptions of procedural fairness, police legitimacy and normative compliance. In this article we contend that as such, contemporary research is in danger of conveying a misreading of PJT by portraying a reified social world divorced from the social psychological dynamics of encounters between the police and policed. In this article we set out a rationale for addressing this potential misreading and explore how and why PJT researchers would benefit both theoretically and methodologically through drawing upon advances in theoretical accounts of social identity, developed most notably in attempts to understand crowd action. Specifically, we advance an articulation of a ‘process-based’ model of PJT’s underlying social and subjective dynamics and stress the value of ethnographic approaches for studying police–‘citizen’ encounters.

Police organisations have a wealth of experience in responding to emergencies, but COVID-19 is unprecedented in terms of the speed, scale and complexity of developing doctrine and its implementation by officers. The crisis also threw into sharp relief the fact that police policy and, crucially, practice are always implemented within wider social, political and economic contexts. Using online survey data collected from 325 police officers based at forces operating across different UK contexts (cities, conurbations, towns and rural areas), we seek to understand officer experiences and perceptions of policing COVID-19. In particular, we examine whether (internally) organisational climate and (externally) the UK government's response to COVID-19 were important to (a) officers' support for police use of force at times of emergency, (b) officer's support for procedurally just policing at times of emergency, and (c) their health and well-being; and whether identification and perceptions of selflegitimacy mediate the associations between these variables. We show that a positive organisational climate was associated with less support for police use of force, more support for procedurally just policing and increased police officer health and well-being. Our results, however, suggest potential negative correlates of police officer self-legitimacy: higher levels of self-legitimacy were associated with poorer police officer health and well-being and increased support for police use of force. These results have important implications for our understanding of police officer well-being and police officers' commitment to democratic modes of policing when faced with policing a pandemic.

Across the latter half of 2019, Hong Kong became the focus of world attention as it was rocked by a wave of increasingly violent confrontations between police and protesters. Both inside and outside the Territory, several powerful political actors have argued that the paramilitary-style police interventions used to manage the protests were necessary because the disorder was being fermented by agitators. In contrast, this article explores the utility of the Elaborated Social Identity Model of crowd behaviour to help explore and explain some of the social psychological dynamics through which the 2019 protests became ‘radicalised’. The article explores three key phases of their evolution to draw out the patterns of collective action and variations in policing approaches. We show that early demonstrations were focused predominantly on preventing the implementation of controversial legislation but spread and changed in form as a function of the use of crowd dispersal tactics by police. Moreover, we show how police inaction at other critical moments helped amplify perceptions of police illegitimacy that further radicalized protesters. Drawing upon a body of primary interview and secondary survey data, we also provide a social psychological analysis. We argue the observed patterns of collective action were underpinned by identity change and empowerment processes brought about as a consequence of both the structural context and the intergroup dynamics created in part by coercive policing practices.

This is a repository copy of Policing football 'risk'? A participant action research case study of a liaison-based approach to 'public order'.