Fair Process, Trust, and Cooperation: Moving Toward an Integrated Framework of Police Legitimacy

Abstract

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.

Fair treatment, fair play? The relationship between fair treatment perceptions, political trust and compliant and cooperative attitudes cross‐nationally

“…Recently, criminology scholars have addressed the importance of legitimacy of police forces and how this relates to perceptions of fairness (e.g., Huq et al 2017). Various studies in the field find evidence that fair treatment by the police as expressed through respectful, impartial and inclusive contact has a positive impact on trust in the police (e.g., Bradford et al 2017;Hamm et al 2017;Reisig et al 2014). We further contribute to this literature by expanding these arguments to the greater political realm.…”

Measuring Public Attitudes Towards the Police

“…The past few years have seen a number of "conceptual stock-take" articles in the social science literature concerning what trust and legitimacy means in the context of the police and other legal authorities (e.g., Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012;Hamm et al, 2017;Hawdon, 2008;Jackson, 2018;Jackson & Gau, 2015;, and we refer the interested reader to those sources. Our goal in the following few pages is to explain the approach that we take to define trust and legitimacy.…”

Are trustworthiness and legitimacy ‘hard to win, easy to lose’? A longitudinal test of the asymmetry thesis of police-citizen contact

“…Previous studies have called them (1) perceived fairness and perceived effectiveness, (2) public confidence in policing, (3) trust in the police, (4) trust in procedural justice and trust in police effectiveness, and (5) legitimacy (differentiating between procedural justice, distributive justice, effectiveness and lawfulness). For example, procedural justice theory specifies that perceived fairness and perceived effectiveness are potential sources of legitimacy (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003), while Tankebe (2013) assumes that they are constituent components of legitimacy (for discussion, see Jackson and Bradford, 2019;Trinkner, 2019;Sun et al, 2019). In our view, the most important conceptual distinction is between (a) task-specific public evaluations and expectations of police conduct (e.g., people's perceptions of the effectiveness and fairness of officers) that we call 'perceived trustworthiness', in that they are the ascribed states and qualities that mean that they can be trusted to do what they are expected to do (cf.…”