Police-Citizen Relations Across the World

Comparing sources and contexts of trust and legitimacy

Dietrich Oberwittler, Sebastian Roché, Dietrich Oberwittler, Sebastian Roché

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138222861
• eBook ISBN: 9781315406640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Police-citizen relations are in the public spotlight following outbursts of anger and violence. Such clashes often happen as a response to fatal police shootings, racial or ethnic discrimination, or the mishandling of mass protests. But even in such cases, citizens' assessment of the police differs considerably across social groups. This raises the question of the sources and impediments of citizens' trust and support for police. Why are police-citizen relations much better in some countries than in others? Are police-minority relations doomed to be strained? And which police practices and policing policies generate trust and legitimacy?

Research on police legitimacy has been centred on US experiences, and relied on procedural justice as the main theoretical approach. This book questions whether this approach is suitable and sufficient to understand public attitudes towards the police across different countries and regions of the world. This volume shows that the impact of macro-level conditions, of societal cleavages, and of state and political institutions on police-citizen relations has too often been neglected in contemporary research.

Building on empirical studies from around the world as well as cross-national comparisons, this volume considerably expands current perspectives on the sources of police legitimacy and citizens' trust in the police. Combining the analysis of micro-level interactions with a perspective on the contextual framework and varying national conditions, the contributions to this book illustrate the strength of a broadened perspective and lead us to ask how specific national frameworks shape the experiences of policing.

Part I

Introduction

1Towards a broader view of police–citizen relations

How societal cleavages and political contexts shape trust and distrust, legitimacy and illegitimacy

Sebastian Roché and Dietrich Oberwittler

Introduction

How to think of relations between the police and the public across countries and in different regions of the world? The intention of this book is to broaden and expand current perspectives on the sources of police legitimacy and citizens’ trust in the police. While research on police–citizen relations has proliferated in the last two decades, much of it is still centred on the USA, the United Kingdom, and a few other, predominantly Western countries. In contrast to what was observed ten years ago, research outside the USA has left its ‘nascent’ phase (Tonry 2007: 3; foreword, this volume) behind and contributed considerably to the field, calling for an expanded focus on cross-national comparisons. Among the many advantages of comparative research is the greater attention paid to national contexts. The impact of macro-level conditions, of societal cleavages, and of state and political institutions on police–citizen relations has been neglected in most contemporary research. Procedural justice theory, the dominant approach, has provided a theoretical basis for the study of public attitudes towards the police. It has gained strong empirical support and has started to inform public policies (Tyler, Goff, and MacCoun 2015). Yet with its focus on micro-level social interactions and citizens’ experiences of policing, it may neither help us to fully grasp the sources of trust in the police and police legitimacy, nor always be suitable for understanding police–citizen relations in different countries.

Police–citizen relations are embedded in the broad context of polities and states. Polities are ‘systems of authority’ or ‘of domination’, to use Max Weber’s words (Weber 1947). Governments dispose of coercive powers. Police forces are a visible branch of state authority, legally entrusted to protect society and maintain order by force when deemed necessary. However, governments cannot rely solely on force. They need to claim and obtain support from their citizens, and to promote national integration and a sense of cohesion among diverse segments of population, or face the risk of discontent and possibly violent conflict. In many countries, the reality is that some social groups do not perceive the political or social order as fair, and do not feel protected by the police. Some individuals or groups may perceive the police as a partisan instrument or the ally of one group in a conflict situation. Thus, to understand police–citizen relations in general and police legitimacy in particular, we must take into account nation-states, the cultural pillars of the political order (e.g. its core values), government and major societal cleavages.

Legitimacy has been studied for longer than the police for a simple reason: The police as a government agency, distinct from the judiciary and the army, did not exist when political philosophers, following in the tradition of social contract theories, started to address the issue of public consent to state authority. When the most revered attempt to conceptualize legitimacy was carried out by Max Weber at the beginning of the twentieth century, policing was not his concern, to say the least (Smith 1970; Terpstra 2011). For very long, it was possible to write about morality, trust, and use of force, notions key to the legitimacy of the state, without touching the issue of policing. It was only in the post-World Word II era that the police became an object of theoretical and empirical examination. During the last 20 years, studies of police legitimacy have blossomed in many different countries. This book does not try to present a comprehensive overview but rather to stimulate the study of policing in a global perspective by including state- and society-level dimensions into the analysis. It brings together case studies from Europe and the USA as well as non-Western countries, in order to promote comparative perspectives on the conditions of police–citizen relations, and to question the generalizability of assumptions and models shaped by research in Western democracies.

From community policing to trustworthiness and legitimacy of the police

During the last 20 years, police legitimacy has emerged as an important academic theme and a political issue, but empirical studies of police–citizen relations have existed in the USA as early as 1930 (Bellman 1935; Parrat 1936). A major catalyst of early research was police use of force and other experiences of unfairness as well as recurrent race riots (often triggered by such incidents) since the 1960s in the USA and the 1980s in the UK (Bowling and Phillips 2008). However, anti-police riots did not prompt a comparable governmental or academic interest in other countries. The largest of such episodes of unrest in Europe took place in France in 2005 without a noticeable impact on research.

For many years, interest in police–citizen relations started from the ‘police end’ of the relationship and took the path of policing strategies. Many studies were concerned with various forms of community policing as a strategy to bridge the gap with segments of the population (see definition by Skogan 1998), leading to an interest in countries like Japan and their koban system (see Bayley 1976; cf. for reviews of research in Australia and Europe Coquilhat 2008; Mackenzie and Henry 2009). Only later did research shift its focus to the other end of the relationship: the citizen. Tom Tyler, in the introduction to his book Why People Obey the Law, gathered quotations illustrating that ‘the nature and underpinnings of legitimacy are among the most neglected aspects of the dynamics of society’, noticing ‘the virtual absence of empirical examination of legitimacy’ (Tyler 1990: 27).

More than 25 years later, the situation is very different in criminology, political science, and policing studies, with an unabated growth in the number of publications. Together with trust, the return of legitimacy to the forefront of research interests indicates a paradigm shift, ‘a turn toward soft variables’ (Sztompka 1999: 1) as opposed to ‘hard’ institutional structures and class stratification. There is an ongoing debate about the notions of trust and legitimacy. While some say that that the two notions are theoretically distinct and assert that it is possible to view an institution as a legitimate authority while simultaneously having little trust in it (Kaina 2008: 511), others present evidence that it is not the case empirically that ‘constructs are distinguishable at a conceptual level’ and that ‘they are not empirically separable’ (Maguire and Johnson 2010; Johnson et al. 2014). In this introduction, we will not draw a definitive distinction between the notions.

The critical element of legitimacy theory is its subjective nature, the subjective interpretations of reality, in line with Max Weber’s ‘interpretative sociology’: ‘The basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige’, Weber (1947: 382) writes. Such a reading of societies as made of individuals places a particular emphasis on the consciousness of actors as they interpret their actions and those of others. Individuals use their subjectively derived interpretations of the behaviour of others to predict the outcome of certain behaviours and, for example, whether to trust an organization, its principles, and its agents. In this line of thinking, interactions (as well as expectations about interactions) and related attitudes about fair interactions are key, and in empirical research survey questions about the feelings of the duty to obey and perceived fairness and trustworthiness are central. Many survey studies following procedural justice theory have stressed that people grant the police legitimacy if they feel they are being treated with fairness and dignity, irrespective of the outcome of the treatment (Donner et al. 2015; Jackson et al. 2013; Tyler 2011).

The contribution of this micro-level, socio-psychological approach to the field is undeniable. In its early stages, research on attitudes towards the police was driven by various poorly connected assumptions, for example on racial, class, and neighbourhood effects or a combination of these. No ‘grand hypothesis’ on the key dependent variables and the roots of obedience guided analyses (Webb and Marshall 1995: 49). It was only later with the interest in procedural justice in interactions that researchers have explored the complex structure of attitudes towards the police. The development of a multidimensional construct of citizen’s perceptions (Shafer et al. 2003) led to the establishment of four core components of ‘just procedure’, formal and informal decision making and quality of treatment (Blader and Tyler 2003; Mazerolle et al. 2013b). The implementation of these concepts into opinion polls has resulted in a better and more nuanced understanding of attitudes regarding procedural fairness and to their standardized measurement that is applied across many countries. This allows researchers to test comparable hypotheses in various cultural and political contexts.

The study of trust and legitimacy: the micro and the macro perspective

However, a theoretical alignment always comes at a price. An interactional orientation deflects the attention away from the impact of social and political structures (like the state, culture, and the economy) on individual attitudes and behaviours, and it tends to ignore political cleavages, policy alternatives (Miller 1974; Miller and Listhaug 1998), political power, social inequalities, and class relations (Farganis 2008: 322). The concept of emergence of larger social processes and structures from individual-level actions and social interactions is important. However, macro structures are critical as ‘frameworks’ which shape the situations in which individuals act and supply to actors a certain set of symbols that allow them to act. This is of particular relevance for the study of the police forces since they are state-controlled organizations, placed under the direction of elected officials operating in a political system. Thus, theoretically speaking, trust in the police and police legitimacy relate to trust in the political system and its legitimacy. In fact, empirically, we have indications that overall support for the political system has a very large influence on trust in the police and that attitudes vis-à-vis the police are influenced by national contexts regarding the quality of police organizations, societal homogeneity, and cohesion and crime levels (see below; cf. Kutnjak Ivkovic 2008; Morris 2001; Weitzer and Tuch 2006). These macro-level foundations of attitudes towards the police become visible in cross-national comparisons and need to be accounted for.

Scholars of political trust have highlighted the role of performance and satisfaction (for example in service delivery or respecting human rights), the importance of institutional procedures (equality before the law and free elections being the master legitimation processes) and participation in decision making mechanisms (Norris 2017). Weber insisted on respect for legal procedures (versus substance, see discussion and critique by Coicaud 2002). Psychologists have also studied procedures, however, at the interactional level, in micro-settings, as John Thibaut and Laurens Walker (1975) did in their seminal experimental work entitled Procedural Justice, A Psychological Analysis, and later in numerous opinion surveys about the feeling of fairness and its impact on attitudes towards the police and police legitimacy (Donner et al. 2015; Mazerolle et al. 2014). The name of procedural justice is used on the micro-level of interactions or attitudes towards such interactions as well as on the macro-or institutional level. The two traditions both of political scientists of input, ‘throughput’ (internal processes), and output processes as well as of psychologists of fair interactions with legal officials (again versus its substance or outcomes) highlight the importance of procedures in modern democracies. Similarities also exist in terms of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Title
• Front Matter
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART I
• Index
• Back Matter