Legitimating Practices: Revisiting the Predicates of Police Legitimacy

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. ). 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.…”

“…Third, several criminologists have also advocated to move the focus from fear to fairness conceptions in the study of compliance (e.g., Hough 2012). Relying on this procedural fairness framework, criminologists have explored the legitimacy of the police and courts and the role of fair treatment on these conceptions (e.g., Bradford et al 2017;Hough et al 2013;Huq et al 2017).…”

Justifying Violence: Legitimacy, Ideology and Public Support for Police Use of Force

“…Legal authorities are increasingly recognizing the importance of generating and sustaining their legitimacy in the eyes of citizens, and if they are to encourage public support and cooperative/compliant behaviour, they need to engage in practices that reflect the normative constraint to their exercision of power -like, for instance, following principles of procedural fairness (Tyler, 2006) and respecting the limits of their authority (Huq et al, 2016). But might the legitimacy that is won by such practices in turn generate public support for normative (not counter-normative) police practices?…”

“…On the one hand, future studies might extend the array of different policing practices that legitimate the institution (cf. Huq et al, 2016). Of particular interest here would be an assessment of whether various legitimating practices that police engage in actually reflect normative constraint.…”

“…A key theoretical question is the extent to which legitimacy places normative limits around appropriate use of force in the eyes of citizens (producing popular consent for the use of reasonable but not excessive violence). Drawing on a convenience sample of US citizens -a limitation of the study that we return to at the end of the paper -we differentiate between the reasonable and excessive force; we apply a two-dimensional conceptualization of legitimacy (Bradford et al 2015;Jackson, 2015;Huq et al 2016); and we evaluate whether the two constituent parts of police legitimacy are associated with the support for reasonable but not excessive use of force.…”