Objectives To test whether normative and non-normative forms of obligation to obey the police are empirically distinct and to assess whether they exhibit different dynamics in terms of the downstream effects of police-citizen contact. Methods Analysing data from the Scottish Community Engagement Trial of procedurally just policing, we use natural effect modelling for causally ordered mediators to assess causal pathways that include-but also extend beyond-the experimental treatment to procedural justice. Results Normative and non-normative forms of obligation are empirically distinct. Normative obligation to obey the police is sensitive to procedurally just or unjust police behaviour, and influences cooperation with the police and traffic law compliance in a way that is consistent with procedural justice theory. Non-normative obligation to obey the police is 'sticky' and unresponsive. Conclusions Legitimacy can resonably be defined partly as normative obligation with its expected beneficial downstream effects, so long as it is measured properly.

Worry about COVID-19 is a central topic of research into the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a new way of measuring worry about catching COVID-19 that distinguishes between worry as a negative experience that damages people’s quality of life (dysfunctional) and worry as an adaptive experience that directs people’s attention to potential problems (functional). Drawing on work into fear of crime, our classification divides people into three groups: (1) the unworried, (2) the functionally worried (where worry motivates proactive behaviours that help people to manage their sense of risk) and (3) the dysfunctionally worried (where quality of life is damaged by worry and/or precautionary behaviour). Analysing data from two waves of a longitudinal panel study of over 1000 individuals living in ten cities in England, Scotland and Wales, we find differing levels of negative anxiety, anger, loneliness, unhappiness and life satisfaction for each of the three groups, with the dysfunctionally worried experiencing the most negative outcomes and the functionally worried experiencing less negative outcomes than unworried. We find no difference between groups in compliance and willingness to re-engage in social life. Finally, we show a difference between the dysfunctionally worried compared with functional and unworried groups in perceptions of risk (differentiating between likelihood, control and consequence). This finding informs what sort of content-targeted messaging aimed at reducing dysfunctional worry might wish to promote. We conclude with some thoughts on the applicability of our measurement scheme for future research.

In this paper we examine consensual and coercive police-citizen relations in São Paulo, Brazil. According to procedural justice theory, legitimacy operates as part of a virtuous circle, whereby normatively appropriate police behavior encourages public self-regulation and pro-active cooperation, which then reduces the need for coercive forms of social control. Tests of the theory in the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere typically pit normative versus instrumental accounts of crime-control policy against one another. But can consensual and coercive police-citizen power relations be so easily disentangled in a city in which many people fear crime, where some people fear police but tolerate extreme police violence, and where the image of the police as “just another (violent) gang” seems still to have significant cultural currency? Our analysis of the composition, predictors and potential consequences of police legitimacy highlights points of similarity and difference in police-citizen relations in this high violence, high fear city of the Global South.

Objectives Test whether cooperation with the police can be modelled as a place-based norm that varies in strength from one neighborhood to the next. Estimate whether perceived police legitimacy predicts an individual's willingness to cooperate in weak-norm neighborhoods, but not in strong-norm neighborhoods where most people are either willing or unwilling to cooperate, irrespective of their perceptions of police legitimacy. Methods A survey of 1057 individuals in 98 relatively high-crime English 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 (1) high mean and low variance, (2) high mean and high variance, (3) (relatively) low mean and low variance, and (4) (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, that cooperation can be modelled as a place-based norm that varies in strength from neighborhood to neighborhood and that legitimacy only predicts an individual's willingness to cooperate in neighborhoods where the norm is relatively weak.

Objective: We conducted an exploratory study testing procedural justice theory with a novel population. We assessed the extent to which police procedural justice, effectiveness, legitimacy, and perceived risk of sanction predict compliance with the law among people experiencing homelessness.Hypotheses: We did not develop formal a priori hypotheses but examined five general research questions. (1) Are there positive associations between police procedural justice, police legitimacy, and compliance? (2) Do procedural justice and legitimacy differentially predict compliance depending on the particular type of offending? (3) Are there positive associations between police effectiveness, perceived risk of sanction and compliance? (4) Does the perceived risk of sanction differentially predict compliance depending on the particular type of offending? (5) Are there positive associations between moral judgements about the different offending behaviors and compliance?Method: Two-hundred people (87% male, 49% aged between 45-64, 37% white British) experiencing homelessness on the streets of an inner London borough completed a survey that included measures of procedural justice, police legitimacy, perceived risk of sanction, morality, and compliance.Results: (1 & 2) Procedural justice and police legitimacy were only weakly (and not significantly) associated with any of the three types of compliance (compliance with low-level crimes, behaviors specific to the street population, and high-level crimes). (3 & 4) Police effectiveness positively predicted compliance via perceived risk of sanction, but only for the kind of street population specific offenses that can be important for survival on the streets such as begging and sleeping in certain localities. ( 5) Morality was positively associated with all three types of compliance behaviors. Supplementary analyses suggested a small amount of instability in the results however, possibly because of the relatively small sample size.