Police self-legitimacy and democratic orientations: Assessing shared values

Abstract

Using a sample of frontline police officers from several mid-sized municipal police departments in the United States, this study explores the relationships between frontline police officers’ self-legitimacy, organizational fit, moral alignment with policed communities, and attitudes toward democratic policing principles. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling, the analysis frames democratic policing using a formative latent construct to test several hypotheses. The results support a direct positive relationship between self-legitimacy and attitudes toward democratic policing, and suggest the relationship is partially mediated by officers' perceptions of moral alignment with their policed communities. The results further demonstrate that self-legitimacy is significantly related to organizational fit, but organizational fit does not appear to mediate the relationship between self-legitimacy and attitudes toward democratic policing.

Predictors of Citizens' Satisfaction and Trust in Police as a Function of Good Governance and Cooperative Culture

“…In addition, police accountability considers law enforcement and is associated with police responsibility for efficiently providing services of maintaining law and order and controlling crimes by fairly treating individuals under the jurisdiction of the laws (Ojedokun, Ogunleye, & Aderinto, 2021). White et al (2021) reported that police could enhance trust among the citizens by increasing legitimacy, ensuring community ownership, continuously improving their services, and ensuring law and order situations in this country.…”

“…In a democratic society, institutions' role, especially police institutions, is vital and significant (White, Kyle, & Schafer, 2021). Research broadly recognize the significance of frontline police officers' attitude and behaviors in establishing peace and harmony and implementing the law and order situation in a country (Blair et al, 2021).…”

“…This corporation and sport come from the citizens' confidence in the police institutions based on their personal experiences and encounters with police officials (Nalla & Nam, 2021). Hence, the ways citizens evaluate the duties performed by police institutions based on their responses to citizens' queries determine the job performances of the police (White et al, 2021).…”

“…Since 1960 a substantial amount of research has been conducted to empirically investigate the citizens' perceptions of police performance in various developed regions, i.e., China (Li et al, 2021;Wu, Sun, & Hu, 2021;Zhang, 2021), the United States (Browning, Merlino, & Sharp, 2021;White et al, 2021), and the United Kingdom (Wuschke, Henning, & Stewart, 2022) This research is important to understand the ways the public evaluates and conceptualizes the performance of the police institutions directly or indirectly supports and cooperates with the police departments. However, scant attention has been paid to assessing Indonesian citizens' perceptions and evaluations of their police regardless of Indonesia among the highly populated countries.…”

“…Moral alignment with the community has been considered important in winning the masses' confidence in public institutions (Sun et al, 2018). When citizens believe that the institutions they rely on have the same interests and are morally aligned with their objectives, they perceive such institutions positively (White et al, 2021). This further results in developing trust among the citizens for such institutions.…”