Identity, legitimacy and “making sense” of police use of force

Abstract

The study draws upon cross-sectional data from a 2015 survey of a representative sample of adults in England & Wales. Structural equation modeling is used to model conditional correlations between latent constructs. Findings: There are two main results. First, identifying more strongly with a social group that the police plausibly represent to people was consistently associated with greater acceptance of police use of force, whether or not that force seemed to be justified. Second, beliefs about the legitimacy of the police were associated with acceptance, but primarily in relation only to the use of force in situations where it appeared prima facie justifiable. Research limitations/implications: The data afford descriptive analyses of conditional correlations between constructs; they do not allow us to infer any cause-and-effect relationship. Social implications (if applicable): Results suggest one possible set of reasons why police retain public support in the face of scandals concerning excessive use of force. Originality/value: This is one of only a very few investigations into (a) the association between legitimacy and public acceptance of apparently illegal or unethical police action and (b) the extent to which identification with a particular social group predicts judgments of police behavior. It is also one of the few papers that has explored the possibility of perverse outcomes arising from procedurally just policing.

Fear and Legitimacy in São Paulo, Brazil: Police-Citizen Relations in a High Violence, High Fear City

“…We found in study one that a fair amount of individuals in São Paulo tolerate-or at least are ambivalent towards-police use of excessive force against certain out-groups, and moreover that significant numbers believe that the police are ineffective against crime and believe the police lack distributive justice. We asked, given these findings, whether tolerance of excessive violence partly legitimates the police in the eyes of citizens (for discussion of the theoretical and empirical links between legitimacy and attitudes towards citizen and police violence, see , Gerber & Jackson, 2017, and Bradford et al, 2017, and whether effectiveness and distributive justice are also important legitimating factors.…”

Affect and trust as predictors of public support for armed police: evidence from London

“…On this account, public trust gives police greater discretionary authority because it motivates a sense that whatever the police are doing, they are doing it for the right reason (Tyler and Huo 2002). Moreover, those who identify more strongly with the social group the police represent are more accepting of police use of force (Bradford et al 2017), for reasons of basic ingroup solidarity but also because shared group membership is linked with trust.…”

Live Facial Recognition: Trust and Legitimacy as Predictors of Public Support for Police Use of New Technology

“…Any such concerns should be tempered by the fact that legitimacy is strongly founded in fairness judgements, and there is a wealth of evidence that suggest unfair practice can have significant downstream effects, resulting ultimately in the withdrawal of consent and sometimes radical change. There is moreover an emerging consensus that when making legitimacy judgements people think about whether police activity is occurring within appropriate legal and ethical boundaries, and that legitimacy suffers when such boundaries are transgressed (Trinkner, Jackson and Tyler 2018); relatedly, recent studies have found that legitimacy promotes support for action with normatively appropriate boundaries but not for activity -such as excessive use of force -that breaches them (Bradford et al 2017;Gerber and Jackson 2017). Legitimacy and the processes that sustain it do not, therefore, provide carte blanche, but rather exist in dynamic tension with police activities and policies, sometimes providing support, at other times constituting a brake or causing a change of direction.…”

“…As with the two components of trust, we assess the extent to which normative alignment is a predictor of privacy concerns and acceptance of LFR, adjusting for duty to obey, and vice versa. Prior work has found that believing the police are a proper and just institution encourages support for actions that fall within existing normative boundaries of behaviour (Gerber and Jackson 2017;Bradford, Milani and Jackson 2017). Believing that power is exercised appropriately is to believe that power is rightfully held, because the ends to which it is directed are appropriate.…”