Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate: Using a Mixed Effects Location-Scale Model to Estimate the Strength of Social Norms at a Small Spatial Scale

Abstract

Objectives: Test whether cooperation with the police can be modelled as a placed-based norm that varies in strength from one neighborhood to the next. Estimate whether police legitimacy predicts willingness to cooperate in weak-norm neighborhoods, but not in strong-norm neighborhoods, where most people are willing to cooperate (or not to cooperate) irrespective of their perceptions of police legitimacy. Methods: A survey of 1,057 individuals in 98 relatively high-crime neighborhoods defined at a small spatial scale measured (a) willingness to cooperate using a hypothetical crime vignette and (b) legitimacy using indicators of normative alignment between police and citizen values. A mixed-effects, location-scale model estimated the cluster-level mean and cluster-level variance of willingness to cooperate as a neighborhood-level latent variable. A cross-level interaction tested whether legitimacy predicts individual-level willingness to cooperate only in neighborhoods where the norm is weak.Results: Willingness to cooperate clustered strongly by neighborhood. There were neighborhoods with (i) high mean and low variance, (ii) high mean and high variance, (iii) (relatively) low mean and low variance, and (iv) (relatively) low mean and high variance. Legitimacy was only a positive predictor of cooperation in neighborhoods that had a (relatively) low mean and high variance. There was little variance left to explain in neighborhoods where the norm was strong. Conclusions: Findings support a boundary condition of procedural justice theory: namely, cooperation can be modelled as a placed-based norm that varies in strength from neighborhood to neighborhood and legitimacy only predicts cooperation in neighborhoods where the norm is relatively weak.

Social and personal control, legitimacy of authorities, and social cohesion as protective factors of anti-sociality in adolescents

“…Adolescents share norms and identities with their group, and most importantly, they help each other. Thus, our results are in congruence with Jackson et al, (2019) that argued that social norms are shared beliefs of conduct based on social perception as well as Germar y Mojzisch (2019) which suggested peer actions influence behavior.…”

“…Social norms (SN) theory argues that peer cognition and actions influence behavior (Germar & Mojzisch, 2019) and is understood as the shared beliefs of conduct based on social perception (Jackson et al, 2019). These can be classified as injunctive or descriptive, where injunctive norms are linked to the beliefs of what individuals are required to do, while descriptive norms relate to what people actually do (Huber, et al, 2017).…”

Police Legitimacy and Citizen Coproduction: How does publicized police brutality impact calling the police?

“…Brutality incidents clearly impact the latter, by undermining beliefs that the police are legitimate, but they may not impact the former. This is consistent with some previous research that has argued that positive feelings towards the police are not necessary for meaningful citizen-police cooperation (Reisig & Giacomazzi 1998) and may matter only in a limited set of neighborhoods (Jackson et al 2020). This by no means suggests, however, that damaged diffuse support is benign.…”

Legitimacy, trust and legal cynicism: a review of concepts

“…They voluntarily behave in ways that are socially desirable for the functioning and maintenance of power (Meares, 2017). This includes not only normatively-grounded compliance with the law (e.g., Jackson et al, 2012;Papachristos et al, 2012;Hough et al, 2013) but also proactive willingness to cooperate with the police and criminal courts (e.g., Jackson et al, 2021b;Murphy et al, 2008).…”