Legal Cynicism, Intrusive Policing, and the Dynamics of Police Legitimacy: Evidence from Brazil’s Largest City

Abstract

Policing approaches that rely on repeated intrusion in the lives of citizens can be accompanied by public cynicism about the ability of legal institutions to ensure public safety. This study provides a quantitative assessment of the dynamics of phenomenon of overpolicing and underpolicing over time. It does so in the context of one of the largest cities in the Global South, with a focus on shifts in support for personal use of violence via diminished perceptions of legitimacy. Drawing upon a three-wave longitudinal survey representative of eight neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil, I demonstrate that perceptions of overpolicing and underpolicing (a) mutually reproduce each other over time, (b) vary significantly by neighborhood, (c) increase after aggressive police stops, (d) undermine police legitimacy, and (e) contribute to more favorable attitudes towards the acceptability of violence. This study provides further evidence on the costs of coercive policing, with significant implications for people’s recognition of the ruling power of legal authority.

Aggressive policing and undermined legitimacy: Assessing the impact of police stops at gunpoint on perceptions of police in São Paulo, Brazil

“…of the respondents are female, 56% are white, and the average age is 40.2 years. Several recent studies of police-citizen relations in Brazil have made use of this data set (see, e.g., Jackson et al, 2021;Oliveira, 2021;Oliveira et al, 2019).…”

Legitimacy, trust and legal cynicism: A review of concepts

“…Recent research has also examined perceptions of over-policing and under-policing in Brazil (Oliveira, 2021). In political philosophy, theories of distributive justice typically coalescence around the fairness of who gets what and why, at which scale (see, for example, Von Platz, 2020).…”

“…Previous research suggest that such perceptions of widespread incapacity of safety provision, in addition to being culturally transmitted (Anderson, 1999;Elliott & Reid, 2019;Cooper et al, 2020), are grounded in an accumulated abundance of direct observations of police nonresponse and ineffectiveness made by individuals in race-class subjugated communities (Brunson & Gau, 2015;Taylor et al, 2009;Kirk & Papachristos, 2011;Kirk & Matsuda, 2011). Linking the discussion on the over-policing-under-policing paradox to Kirk and colleagues' approach to legal cynicism, one can view the construct being measured as combining the rejection of the binding nature of the law in somebody's everyday life with the sense of being under-protected by the police (see Oliveira, 2021). From this perspective, baked into the idea of legal cynicism as a cultural frame is the identity-relevant sense that the police are sending respondents messages of neglect and lack of care and protection.…”

“…For instance, police conduct could send positive messages of agency and autonomy depending on officers' respect for the boundaries of their authority. Crucially, negative messages of denigration, suspicion, intrusion, and lack of protection (e.g., via overpolicing and underpolicing) could communicate otherness and social exclusion (Mackenzie, 2020;Oliveira, 2021).…”

“…Beyond reviewing key concepts, our contribution in this paper is to offer some early, speculative thoughts on a how relational model of legitimacy can extend beyond procedural justice. We consider how other aspects of police behaviour can send relational messages not only about people's status and value within group (via procedural justice), but also positive messages of agency and autonomy (via bounded authority; see Trinkner et al, 2018) and negative messages of denigration, suspicion, control and lack of protection (via overpolicing and underpolicing; see Oliveira, 2021). These negative messages speak, potentially, to existing issues of social inequality -because of the location of groups in social hierarchies that tend to feel controlled, over-policed and denigrated -and are redolent of what Mackenzie (2020, p. 200) says when she writes: identities, autonomy, and sense of self-respect" 3 -we argue that perceiving that officers overstep their rightful authority, do not adequately protect themselves and/or certain social groups, and over-policing themselves and/or certain groups can be important to legitimacy because these actions, like procedural injustice, can send the important negative identity-related messages.…”