Promoting Community Collaboration in Counterterrorism: Do Social Identities and Perceptions of Legitimacy Mediate Reactions to Procedural Justice Policing?

Abstract

The present study examines whether procedural justice policing can promote Muslims' willingness to cooperate with police in terrorism prevention. Using survey data from 800 Australian Muslims, we show that Muslims value procedural justice when it comes to working with police to prevent terrorism. We also examine whether social identification processes or perceptions of police legitimacy explain why procedural justice promotes Muslims' willingness to work with police. The findings suggest that despite the salience of identity within the current political discourse about terrorism and Islam, perceptions of police legitimacy appear to have a stronger bearing on Muslims' predicted behaviour. We consider

When is policing fair? Groups, identity and judgements of the procedural justice of coercive crowd policing

“…Fourth, the measurement of social identification in PJT research has tended to use items relating to the superordinate category the police are seen to embody (e.g., Bradford 2014, Madon et al 2016. Previous work has therefore largely ignored what we will refer to as relational identification, in other words, the extent to which those being policed identify with the police as a social category in their own right.…”

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

“…Tests in the US, UK and Australia generally find that perceived police legitimacy is a more important predictor of cooperation than instrumental factors related to effectiveness and risk (Tyler, 2006a(Tyler, , 2006b(Tyler, , 2013Huq et al, 2011;Jackson et al, 2013a;Tyler & Jackson, 2014;Murphy et al, 2015Murphy et al, , 2017Madon et al, 2016;Bolger & Walters, 2019). Work from an increasing number of countries across the world has also addressed the factors that legitimate the police (Jackson, 2018).…”

Border Policing, Procedural Justice and Belonging: the Legitimacy of (cr)Immigration Controls in Border areas

“…The Group Engagement Model (GEM) shares several similarities with the GVM, but differs in some other aspects. The core idea of this model is that people are more likely to cooperate with authorities they identify with (Madon et al, 2016). Strongly relying on social interactionist and labelling theories, the model furthermore stresses that authorities can actually shape social identities (Blader and Tyler, 2009;Bradford et al, 2014Bradford et al, , 2015.…”

“…Experiencing unfair treatment might thus lead to a diminishing sense of belonging and feelings of disengagement from the subordinate group. This might not only have serious psychological consequences for the individual involved and lead to a reluctance to engage with members of the group the authorities represent, but can also decrease legitimacy and ultimately make it less likely for people to cooperate with authorities in the future (Madon et al, 2016). Especially when unfair treatment is experienced on numerous occasions and by different actors, this might lead to diminishing levels of trust and further marginalization (Blackwood, 2015).…”