Legitimacy-Based Policing and the Promotion of Community Vitality

Abstract

This Element presents the history, research, and future potential for an alternative and effective model of policing called 'legitimacy-based policing'. This model is driven by social psychology theory and informed by research findings showing that legitimacy of the police shapes public acceptance of police decisions, willingness to cooperate with the police, and citizen engagement in communities. Police legitimacy is found to be strongly tied to the level of fairness exercised by police authority, i.e. to procedural justice. Taken together these two ideas create an alternative framework for policing that relies upon the policed community's willing acceptance of and cooperation with the law. Studies show that this framework is as effective in lowering crime as the traditional carceral paradigm, an approach that relies on the threat or use of force to motivate compliance. It is also more effective in motivating willing cooperation and in encouraging people to engage in their communities in ways that promote social, economic and political development. We demonstrate that adopting this model benefits police departments and police officers as well as promoting community vitality.

Subjective Obligation to Obey the Police in Diverse Societies: A Social Resistance Perspective

“…Another notable finding in our research is that procedural justice was correlated significantly and positively with the obligation to obey the police among all social groups in our study. This adds to the well-established literature on the process-based model of legitimacy, which holds that how police officers treat the public and display their authority have a substantive impact on how citizens of all social groups view the police and their compliance-related attitudes and behaviours (Mazerolle et al 2013b;Tyler and Nobo 2023). Interestingly, controlling the other variables in the model, anger was not found to be related to the obligation to obey the police in any of the five groups.…”

“…Our second motivation relates to the reasons for differences in citizens' compliance with the law. Previous works have suggested several explanatory frameworks for why individuals and groups may differ in this respect, including procedural justice, self-help, and strain or anger (Barkworth and Murphy 2015;Tankebe and Asif 2016;Tyler and Nobo 2023;Weisburd 1988). However, while such propositions hold some promise for explaining group differences, they largely do not account for macro-level considerations, such as social class, power relations, discrimination and alienation from the state.…”

The Roles of Police-Related versus Non-Police-Related Considerations in Shaping Diffused Support for the Police: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…How Do Macro-Level Views of the Police Develop? Policing-Related Considerations as Antecedents of Macro-Level Views of the Police An important assumption underlying much of the work on public attitudes toward the police, and particularly the research taking the social psychology perspective (for a review, see Tyler and Nobo 2023), is that individuals develop their global, macrolevel views of the police (which are general assessments of approval or "liking" of the police, such as "trust", "legitimacy", "satisfaction" or "support") primarily based on micro-level assessments of what the police are (or are not) doing. By "micro-level" assessments, we are referring to concrete evaluations of specific aspects of policing, such as effectiveness in fighting crime and fair treatment of citizens.…”

Forensic Science – Believe It or Not? Public Attitudes toward Forensic Evidence in Israel

“…It is important to emphasize that the present study makes no pretence to incorporate public views of forensic evidence into the well-established model of police legitimacy (as a component, predictor or outcome of legitimacy; e.g. Tyler and Nobo 2023). Alternatively, in framing the study and situating it in the literature on public attitudes toward the police, we take a broad perspective and consider the way a significant element of police work (forensics) is viewed by the public as inevitably and intrinsically linked to the popular legitimacy of law enforcement authorities.…”