Just Authority?

Trust in the Police in England and Wales

Jonathan Jackson, Ben Bradford, Betsy Stanko, Katrin Hohl

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136254437
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

What does it mean to trust the police? What makes the police legitimate in the eyes of the policed? What builds trust, legitimacy and cooperation, and what undermines the bond between police and the public? These questions are central to current debates concerning the relationship between the British police and the public it serves. Yet, in the context of British policing they are seldom asked explicitly, still less examined in depth.

Drawing on psychological and sociological explanatory paradigms, Just Authority? presents a cutting-edge empirical study into public trust, police legitimacy, and people's readiness to cooperate with officers. It represents, first, the most detailed test to date of Tom Tyler's procedural justice model attempted outside the United States. Second, it uncovers the social ecology of trust and legitimacy and, third, it describes the relationships between trust, legitimacy and cooperation.

This book contains many important lessons for practitioners, policy-makers and academics. As elsewhere the dominant vision of policing in Great Britain continues to stress instrumental effectiveness: the 'fight against crime' will be won by pro-active and even aggressive policing. In line with work from the United States and elsewhere, Just Authority? casts significant doubt on such claims. When people find policing to be unfair, disrespectful and careless of human dignity, not only is trust lost, legitimacy is also damaged and cooperation is withdrawn as a result. Absent such public support, the job of the police is made harder and the avowed objectives of less crime and disorder placed ever further from reach.

Part 1
Introduction

This book is an investigation into the psychological and sociological mechanisms driving public trust, police legitimacy and the willingness of citizens to cooperate with police officers. It was completed at a time of intense debate over the August 2011 riots, the extent of police involvement in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, disproportionality in the use of stop-and-search powers, and the policing of demonstrations such as the ‘Occupy’ movement. All these issues and more were regularly aired in the media and other forums. Less publicly visible but arguably more fundamental, the election of the first Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) was only months away. The Labour Party had recently announced an ‘Independent Commission’ into policing; there was political wrangling over proposed cuts in the numbers of officers; and a new Commissioner had only recent taken up the reins at Scotland Yard following the rapid, and controversial, departure of his two predecessors.

Policing was at the top of the political, media and public agendas. Significant change in the structure of policing in England and Wales was afoot. Transformations were heralded by tensions in the relationship between police and public and widespread debate over the role of the police in a time of austerity. Yet we, like others, felt a strong sense of déjà vu. PCCs aside, much of the above seems eerily familiar. Scandals around the treatment of ethnic minorities, the policing of riots and other public-order events, corruption within the service, and the extent of political interference from outside it, have been issues in British policing since at least the 1970s. Politicians and senior officers have long been concerned about a decline in public trust and a crisis in police legitimacy for at least as long. Indeed, concerns about a loss of trust in, and respect for, the police were raised by the 1929 Royal Commission on the police (Weinberger 1995), as well as by its counterpart in 1962 (Royal Commission on the Police 1962).

What does the congruence in current and historical concerns tell us? First, it underlines that policing is a fundamentally controversial topic – a site of contest about the way society treats its less privileged members, about who needs protecting from whom, and about the limits of state power. Second, repeated questioning of the distribution of police activity draws attention to its impact on individuals and communities who, for whatever reason, become ‘police property’. More broadly, the instrumental aims of the police – and the effects of policing on citizens – are always a key part of the social and political landscape. Third, there is an undeniable sense of nostalgia and a peculiarly British (or English) prelapsarian vision of what policing should be (Loader and Mulcahy 2003). Fourth, and threaded through all the above, issues of fairness, probity, trust and legitimacy are placed right at the centre of a debate that has been going on for 40 years. The importance of public trust in the police is constantly restated, and its apparent decline constantly bemoaned.

The relationship between police and public stands central to all these concerns. What do people think about the police? Why do they trust it and grant it legitimacy? Why do they cooperate with the police and criminal courts? These questions seem both timely and perennial. Embedded in a wider social context, yet irreducibly personal to those involved, they play out in the context of long-term social change – such as the post-60s decline in deference and the increasing struggle of state and public institutions to maintain legitimacy in a globalised, multi-polar world (Reiner 1992; 2010) – as well as the immediate, micro-level interaction between officer and citizen (Waddington 1999). The implications of a loss of public trust, and the implications of a de-legitimation of the police, are enormous: at both ideological and mundane levels, the police rely on the consent, assistance and cooperation of the public. Policing by consent is a fine phrase, but it means little if we do not understand why people defer to officers, offer them support, or provide them with information. In this book we place people’s use and experience of policing centre-stage.

Leaving aside questions concerning the police organisation, the links between police and other agencies, and the laws that govern or should govern police activity – as important as these issues are – we concentrate instead on the ways members of the public think, behave and react in relation to the police. Exploring the perceived social distance between police and the public, two points orient the discussion. First, trust in the police, while both multi-faceted and multi-sourced, rests most importantly on fairness judgements (Tyler and Huo 2002). Second, the legitimacy of the police – a complex social phenomenon involving individual, organisational and institutional elements (Bottoms and Tankebe 2012) – is nonetheless constituted in a fundamental way by the beliefs, assessments and actions of the people it serves (Beetham 1991).

These ideas are explained and expanded on in the chapters that follow. Our approach is intensely empirical. Trust and legitimacy are social facts; their presence or absence has important material implications for individuals, communities and the police itself. Using social survey data, primarily from London, we trace a path from the roots of trust (or mistrust) through the factors that influence the trust judgements people make, to the effect that trust has on legitimacy and the ways legitimacy plays out in public propensities to cooperate, or not, with police. Although these pathways find expression primarily at the individual level, the underlying causal mechanisms seem to refer to the importance of social groups in people’s lives. One reason why people care so deeply about the fairness of the police is that the police represent a social group most find important and to which most feel affiliation – the nation state or community. Fairness indicates status and respect within this group (Tyler and Blader 2000). Despite its social psychological bent, this book fits well with other more sociological accounts of British policing that have stressed the symbolic role of the police in providing a bridge between nation, community and self (Girling et al. 2000; Loader and Mulcahy 2003).

‘The police’ in London and beyond

Our data consider public understandings of a police service rooted in a city that claims modern policing as part of its own legacy. The Metropolitan Police consciously draw on this history to form part of its own ‘founding myth’. So it is useful at this early juncture to address the history of policing and to define what is meant by ‘police’ in the context of this book.

Over the past 200 years or so, the police service in Great Britain, as elsewhere, emerged from previous modes of policing to become an organised body of people with a specific set of duties and responsibilities limited primarily to crime and the maintenance of order. Exactly when the first such ‘police force’ came into being is unclear – mid-eighteenth-century Paris had the lieutenant general de police, commanding a force of around 3,000 men (Emsley 2007: 65), and similar arrangements were in place in other European cities around the same time. But it was the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 that is still generally cited as the first instance of a police force in the modern sense (Reiner 2010).

Much of the debate about police and policing revolves around research on the institution of policing itself. Despite this, precise definitions of what the police actually is – either substantively or formally – have proved elusive (Manning 2010). The sheer variety of police organisations, and the range of policing activities in which they are involved, may mean a single definition is unachievable. Yet Bittner’s (1975) much-quoted definition retains significant appeal; the police are the body responsible for dealing with situations requiring ‘non-negotiably coercible’ remedies. Bittner conceptualises policing through the eyes of the public, who conceive what the police are to be determined by what they do, or more precisely, how they are used. People ‘locate’ the police by reference to the tools it has to address the huge range of situations it is called upon to deal with. Famously, these situations can be defined as moments when ‘something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening’ is occurring, ‘about-which-someone-had-better-do-something-now’ (Bittner 1975).

Linking this public-generated definition of the police to the idea that the modern state is the monopolist of the use of legitimate force, Bittner positions the (potential) use of force as the central element of the police’s role and its ‘offer’ to the public. In ideal-typical terms, procedures applied by police to remedy a situation cannot be opposed by the public. If they are, then force may be used to ensure that it is the will of the officers that prevails. After all, people call the police in order that it ‘does something’ and many of these calls concern immediate, specific conflicts where an imposed solution is desired or required. The police can be – and are – called upon in almost any situation involving disagreement, threat or the possibility of danger (that is, from lost pets to crowd control to actual crimes). Although many such situations will be only tangentially connected to the criminal law, all imply expectations that the police will provide at least proximal solutions by drawing on the authority the potential use of force provides.

But the public police are not the only policing actor, in mature democracies or anywhere else. In the UK at least it has become increasingly obvious over the past 15 to 20 years that positioning the police as the only, or even the primary, agent of policing is an outdated idea. Indeed some authors have noted that to a greater or lesser extent the public police have never held this role and that ‘policing beyond the police’ (Crawford 2003) or private policing has always been an important element in the maintenance of public order (Johnston 1992). Many commentators have begun to talk of ‘security networks’ (Newburn 2001), within which private security guards, CCTV, and other correlates of ‘mass private property’ (Shearing and Stenning 1981) work alongside or with the police both in the enforcement of law and order and in many of the traditional police service functions. Furthermore the New Labour government triggered a massive growth in quasi-public policing – Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), Street Wardens, and so on – who occupy an area of middle ground, publicly employed but with few of the legal and symbolic powers available to sworn police officers. More than ever there is a need to conceptualise the police – whether as the publicly funded guardians and arbitrators of the law, or as the holders of the monopoly of the legitimate use of force, or both – separately from the activities of policing, which in modern society is conducted by many disparate institutions and bodies, as well as via those informal social controls which have always operated to impose and regulate behavioural norms. In much academic and policy discourse, police and policing are increasingly treated as two distinct areas of concern, with the latter enclosing the former as well as many other activities, organisations and social behaviours.

Yet, there is little evidence to suggest that such distinctions are made by citizens who still draw on public policing to assist them and who still believe that a visible, uniformed police presence is linked to security. Indeed, there may be much justification for the public’s apparent unwillingness to let go of ‘policing by the police’. Not because an array of other organisations is uninvolved in policing, but rather that the rise of diverse ‘security networks’ has not led to a decline in the power of the public police, nor a significant shift of its core responsibilities to other agencies (Newburn and Reiner 2004). Although the paramount position of the UK police as state organised and funded specialists in the provision of policing has been challenged by the growth of plural policing, there has been a gradual accretion of powers to the public police over the past 20 years, particularly through the passage of legislation designed to combat terrorism. This has left police officers with a set of powers that ‘far exceeds’ those of the ordinary citizen (ibid: 606) and, equally, earlier generations of police. The public police may have much more competition than previously, but they also have considerably more power, and arguably an ever increasing public profile, especially in the debates about security and safety.

There is surely little doubt that the majority of people, when asked who ‘does’ policing, would answer ‘the police’, meaning sworn officers with all the traditional set of responsibilities and abilities, the monopoly of the use of legitimate force, and (usually) dressed in a blue uniform. Moreover, when the public are asked about how to enhance security, they often reply they want to see ‘more uniforms’ visible on the street. For this reason if nothing else we use the term ‘police’ to refer exclusively to the public police and not to other agencies involved in modern day policing.

Our book studies people’s experience of this police, their beliefs about its trustworthiness, their recognition and justification of police power, and their willingness to cooperate with legal authorities. And as we elaborate in Chapter 1, we take a distinctively interdisciplinary perspective. From a psychological perspective we show the validity of an extended version of Tyler’s influential procedural justice model of policing; from a sociological perspective we highlight the social ecology of people’s orientations to the police, linking informal policing processes operating in local neighbourhoods to people’s inferences about the justified action of the police. So let us turn to an outline of our objectives and a catalogue of our contributions.

1
Social and moral connections

This book is about the bond between the police and the public. Why do people trust the police? Why do they grant legitimacy to officers and the institution? Why do they cooperate with the police and criminal courts? These are important questions because they speak to the vital nature of policing by consent. First, the public deserve and desire a police force that is legitimate, just, effective and restrained in its use of power. Second, the police depend upon trust, legitimacy and the cooperation of the public to function in an effective and fair manner. Third, contacts between police and public – for example through stop-and-search – have the potential to catastrophically damage people’s trust in police, thus eroding the legitimacy of the law and the right of legal authorities to command common support.

We present in these pages the findings from a major study into the police-related experiences, attitudes and behaviours of Londoners. Our analyses highlight the vital nature of public trust and police legitimacy. From a policy perspective, our findings speak to the continued importance of the British idea of ‘policing by consent’. Policing works best when the police can encourage normative commitment to legal authorities (Banton 1964; Bittner 1975; Smith 2007; Hough 2007a; Hough et al. 2010; Reiner 2010). Absent such commitment, a sole reliance on the threat or use of force drives a wedge between the police and those they serve, with significant economic and social implications. Adversarial police tactics risk the legitimacy of legal authorities, and the quickest way for the police to lose public consent is through mistreatment and unjust action.

We also add to a growing international literature on public trust and police legitimacy (e.g. Tyler and Huo 2002; Sunshine and Tyler 2003b; Reisig et al. 2007; Murphy et al. 2009; Tankebe 2009; Reisig and Lloyd 2009; Hough et al. 2010; Murphy and Cherney 2011; Cherney and Murphy 2011; Gau 2011; Elliott et al. 2011; Hasibi and Weisburd 2011; Stott et al. 2011; Jonathan-Zamir and Weisburd 2011; Ward et al. 2011; Kochel 2011; Bradford 2011a; Jackson et al. 2011, 2012a; Tyler et al. 2011b; van Craen 2012; Côté-Lussier in press; Huq et al. 2011; and Jackson et al. 2012a). Bridging psychological and sociological levels of analysis, we consider individual and neighbourhood factors that explain variation in trust, legitimacy and cooperation across London. Linking fair and respectful treatment to trust and legitimacy, we show that legitimacy finds practical expression in people’s sense of obligation to defer to authorities, alignment with the morals that officers represent, and willingness to cooperate with the police and criminal courts. Demonstrating the important role of people’s use and experience of policing, we show that contacts between police and public – for example through stop-and-search – have the potential to catastrophically damage people’s trust, as well as erode the legitimacy of the law and the right of legal authorities to command common support.

The findings we present in the following pages together form four core contributions. First, we conduct the most comprehensive test of Tyler’s psychological model of cooperation with the police out...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Trends and trajectories
• Part 3 Why do people trust the police?
• Part 4 Why do people grant the police legitimacy?
• Part 5 Why do people cooperate with the police?
• Part 6 Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index