Race, Bureaucracy, and Symbolic Representation: Interactions between Citizens and Police

Abstract

Our understanding of representation by government employees has increased considerably in the past 30 years. Scholars have found that represented groups benefit from representative bureaucracies and conclude that this benefit is a function of active representation. However, due to the aggregate unit of observation used in most of these studies and the outcome measures that are typically used as dependent variables, we argue that there are other forms of representation that can explain these finding. We contribute to the existing research in this area by focusing on symbolic representation and conduct our test using individual-level data from a national police-citizen contact survey. We hypothesize that citizen perceptions of legitimacy regarding police actions are shaped by the interaction of citizen race and officer race. Our results suggest that symbolic representation does occurblacks are more likely to perceive police actions as being legitimate if there are black officers present. Additionally, whites are more likely to perceive police actions as legitimate if the actions were conducted by white officers.

The Politics of Inclusion: Black Political Incorporation and the Use of Lethal Force

“…Research suggests that the presence of Black elected officials increases the likelihood that Black interests are represented in the policy process (Bratton, 2002;Lim, 2006;Mladenka, 1989;Saltzstein, 1989). Policies that are more responsive to minorities are increasingly significant in the face of vast criminal justice disparities, as perceptions of the legitimacy of police actions are also conditioned upon race (Theobald & Haider-Markel, 2009). Police administrators have greater incentives to curb police violence if the mayor is Black (Jacobs & O'Brien, 1998).…”

“…Black political representation has been shown to increase bureaucratic representation (Eisinger, 1982;Mladenka, 1989;Sass & Mehay, 2003) and has also been positively linked to notions of empowerment that subsequently impact Blacks' level of trust, efficacy, and participation (Bobo & Gilliam, 1990;Tate, 2003). However, Black officers may be more likely to be viewed as less repressive among Black citizens where there is greater representation of Blacks on the police force (Frank, Brandl, Cullen, & Stichman, 1996), but these notions are based on what race represents to the public and not the actions of public officials (Theobald & Haider-Markel, 2009). In fact, Black officers may act more harshly toward Black citizens (Brown & Frank, 2006;Thompson, 1976).…”

“…Marschall and Ruhil (2007) demonstrated that Black citizens report higher levels of satisfaction with police services and neighborhood conditions that are rooted in tangible improvements when represented by Blacks in city hall and that these gains in the evaluation of government performance are particularly evident when Black mayors have long tenures in office. Black political efficacy has been shown to reduce perceptions of injustice (Jacobs & Carmichael, 2002) and subsequently Black violence against the police (Kaminski & Stucky, 2009), but research indicates that there is likely a trade-off between Black and White perceptions of justice as Black political incorporation (Frank et al, 1996) and Black bureaucratic representation (Theobald & Haider-Markel, 2009) increase. In addition, Black city council representation has been shown to reduce perceptions of the police as an occupational force (Shihadeh & Flynn, 1996), and such perceptions are likely to increase voluntary compliance with the law (Tyler, 2004a(Tyler, , 2006.…”

“…Other scholars have conceptualized these notions in terms of descriptive and symbolic representation (Pitkin, 1967) and have examined the effect on active or substantive representation (Haider-Markel, Joslyn, & Kniss, 2000). These studies and others have regularly found that descriptive representation influences the behavior and attitudes of constituents (Gay, 2002) and is often conditioned upon societal identification (Theobald & Haider-Markel, 2009;Tyler & Huo, 2002). Representative bureaucracy theorists have also used these ideas to understand the conditions in which descriptive representation might lead to active representation (Meier, 1975(Meier, , 1993Meier & Smith, 1994;Meier, Wrinkle, & Polinard, 1999), and a number of diverse outcomes have been linked to minority representation, including the distribution of public expenditures and services (Eisinger, 1982) and the implementation of police reforms (Jacobs, 1998;Saltzstein, 1989).…”

NEW BLOOD: Implications of en masse recruitment for the South African Police Service

“…However, the need for representation is not necessarily about people wanting to be served by an officer who shares their own racial or ethnic identity, though this has been shown to be a consideration for some people. 73 Legitimacy may have more to do with a sense of 'shared group membership' , 74 where people feel that both they and the police form part of a common collective. 'Citizens must feel that it is "our" police force defending the rights of "all of us", not "their" police force protecting the interest of "them". '…”