The Politics of Policing: Between Force and Legitimacy: Volume 21

In this chapter, I reflect on the foundations of the “fair policing from the inside out” approach to identify elements that may complement and refine this theoretical framework.

I address the question of how fair policing can be achieved from a multidisciplinary perspective. Insights and empirical evidence from criminology, psychology, management, and political science/public administration are used to theorize the relationship between internal and external procedural justice.

Both the theoretical framework itself and the conceptual model that has been derived from it are refined. In total, four aspects are elaborated: (1) I stress more explicitly the potential mediating role of moral alignment with citizens; (2) I point more explicitly at the potential mediating role of trust in supervisors and moral alignment with supervisors; (3) I hypothesize that strain/stress may mediate the relationship between internal and external procedural fairness; and (4) I hypothesize several links between mediators.

This chapter contributes to the challenge of theorizing the origins of fair policing. It aims at widening the scope of police research.

Drawing from literature on organizations that function efficiently and effectively while maintaining low levels of errors and occupational injuries and deaths, we argue that police departments can enhance their legitimacy by adopting the practices found in such organizations because doing so can reduce the frequency of unnecessary force against citizens and lower officer injury rates.

To support our argument, we review literatures on the causes and avoidance of errors in organizations, identify how well-run organizations in high-risk environments are able to operate safely, and describe how police departments can adopt similar practices as a mechanism to enhance officer safety and lower the rate at which officers use force against citizens.

By adopting the practices of successful organizations in other fields, police departments and their officers can promote and enhance their safety while simultaneously reducing their use of force against citizens. By doing so, police can raise the level of legitimacy they hold in the eyes of the American public, which has arguably decreased in the wake of recent events involving police gunfire.

Our ideas contribute to the policing literature by: (1) highlighting a preexisting body of literature and outlining its application to police organizations and (2) detailing how both the police and the public can benefit from improved police practices.

Changing environments demand that police improve their effectiveness in reducing crime, while maintaining community confidence, support and legitimacy. How can police agencies encourage third parties to take responsibility for crime problems while avoiding inequitable outcomes?

The evidence for effective policing for crime reduction is examined, with a focus on third party policing. Potential adverse outcomes are discussed, and a normative framework is proposed.

Third party policing that is both effective and legitimacy enhancing is possible, if four key principles are observed. These are conducting a broad planning approach that includes consideration of the detriments as well as the benefits of strategies especially to vulnerable community members, clearly identified goals and the use of the least coercive means possible, clearly articulated policies and protocols, and institutional and individual accountability for strategy implementation and outcomes.

There is emerging evidence about the effectiveness of regulatory approaches to crime reduction, such as third party policing, but little attention has been paid to its potential for inequitable outcomes and impact on police legitimacy.

This chapter seeks to illuminate the interconnectedness of procedural justice, use of force, and occupational culture in relation to police legitimacy.

The authors review the existing literature and offer an integrated methodological approach that would better assist researchers in their quest to enhance police legitimacy.

Using a systematic design that assesses police legitimacy from a variety of sources has the potential to help answer critical questions with regard to improving police practice.

This is a novel study approach, which has yet to be implemented but which may offer great insight with respect to improving police legitimacy.

This chapter is devoted to analysing the historical peculiarity of the contemporary British politics of policing.

Research is based on an analysis of policy statements and debates, news reports, and official statistics, in the light of historical studies of the earlier politics of policing.

The Conservative government’s police reform programme severely diminishes the resources, powers, status and independence of the police, reversing the Tory’s traditional unquestioning support of the police. The package is shown to reflect broader changes in political economy and culture under neoliberalism.

There has been no previous academic analysis bringing together the various aspects of the reform programme, contrasting it with previous historical understanding of the politics of policing, and linking it to broader contemporary change.

Actual debates around the Swiss police see a decrease in respect and an increase in attacks toward police officers. Such non-respect can be seen as a lack of feelings of obligation to obey the police. Instead of asking whether such a proclaimed increase in disrespect is indeed happening in Switzerland, this chapter analyzes aspects of legitimacy. It builds on the question whether the population sees the Swiss police as a legitimate force.

Swiss police’s legitimacy will be elaborated in two parts. After giving an overview about current debates, known theoretical aspects of legitimacy will be outlined. These aspects build the ground for empirical analyses that follow. Results are based on data of the European Social Survey ESS5.

The Swiss population sees the police as a legitimate force. The majority morally align with the police, they feel an obligation to obey their directives, and they ascribe legality to their actions. Furthermore, also procedural fairness is highly ascribed to the Swiss police. Finally, age correlates only with certain aspects of legitimacy. While moral alignment increases with age, as well as positive views about police’s procedural fairness, no effects were found for feelings of obligation to obey. However, elderly people more often see a political influence on police’s decisions and actions.

While in Anglo-Saxon countries research on legitimacy of the police is broad, no analyses are known for Switzerland so far. Moreover, topics around the Swiss police are often emotionally debated in media, with a lack of empirical evidence. This chapter contributes to close this gap. It gives an insight on the population’s perception of the Swiss police and offers an important scientific foundation for actual debates.

The police in India do not meet the standards of legitimacy. This chapter examines a significant question – why in the largest democracy police are deemed illegitimate and untrustworthy?

The chapter draws from the literature about police role and functioning in India. Data from the Crime in India and other publications is utilized to assess the nature of policing and interactions with the citizens. Since the police derive their legitimacy from that of the government, the nature of politics and its impact upon the police organization is assessed from various reports and publications.

There is significant evidence to suggest that in India, citizens distrust the police and fear the officers while the police too remain mired in corruption, brutality, violating the rights of citizens. Two arguments are made to explain the reasons for the illegitimacy of police system: first, that the police model is incompatible with the plural and diverse democratic framework of the country. Second, that the political leaders have vitiated the democratic polity itself, preventing the growth of independent public institutions that could hold them accountable. All these have serious consequences for the health and vitality of the largest democracy in the world.

This chapter provides evidence about incompatibility of colonial policing with liberal democratic order and argues that political leadership is largely responsible for the illegitimacy of police and other public institutions.

In this study we set out to explain police support for the use of force, police response to a vignette about force, and police self-reported use of force.

The computer-assisted survey was conducted among 419 officers of the Metropolitana police department in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The regression analyses show that a substantial part of how officers view force, and the reported frequency of their own use of force, can be explained through demographic characteristics, organizational features, attitudes toward citizens, and personal experience.

This study was conducted in a region where excessive police use of force is unfortunately a continuing concern. Based on the results we advise police organizations to tackle this issue by investing in improving police attitudes toward both internal and external relations. We also recommend prohibiting officers to carry the regulatory gun while off duty, in order to reduce deaths of both civilians and officers.

Throughout the world the police have undergone considerable criticism for a lack of transparency and accountability. Many police agencies across the world have been grappling with how to improve transparency and accountability, as well as public acceptance of the police, most especially in minority and immigrant communities, which are the places where aggressive police tactics are often most visible.

This chapter considers policing in Boston, United States, and Bordeaux, France, framed by a three-part medical intervention model. The central thesis here is that in their quest to shed their other social support roles or in undercounting and undervaluing such efforts the police lose an opportunity to reframe the police legitimacy discussion. While issues of police legitimacy have been predominantly framed as fair treatment at the point of being stopped, admonished, arrested, or detained, much of what the police do to actually support communities is not much accounted for in the present legitimacy discourse.

Our preliminary findings suggest that public contact with the police goes well beyond issues of crime. Individuals and communities use the police for preventing harm, responding to a wide array of needs and for mitigating harm and fear, all of which help frame public opinion toward the police and hence shape the level of legitimacy accorded the police.

Analysis of police data from Boston and impressions from a developing effort in Bordeaux consider how the police are organized and what they do in these very different cultures, thereby broadening the conception and measurement of police efforts that support or detract from legitimacy.

Previous research on community attitudes toward the police focuses on suspect race as an important predictor of attitudes toward law enforcement and police use of force. Generally, missing from these studies, however, is the role of mental illness, both independently and in conjunction with race, and its effect on perceptions of police. This chapter summarizes our recent research addressing two issues: (1) how race and mental illness of suspects affect perceptions of the appropriateness of police use of force, and (2) how race and mental illness of citizens affect perceptions of police.

We examine these issues by summarizing research obtained through The Portland Race and Mental Illness Project (PRMIP), a survey administered to residents of Portland, Oregon. For our first topic, we use an experimental vignette that randomly alters race and mental health status of suspects. For our second topic, we ask respondents to self-report race, mental health status, and perceptions of the police.

Our dual focus provides two key findings: first, citizens’ perceptions of police use of force are affected by suspect race and mental health status. Second, like Black citizens, citizens with mental illness also have a negative impression of law enforcement.

Our research builds on research indicating racial disparity in trust in police by showing that mental illness – both that of the respondent and that of a suspect – affects attitudes toward the police. These results suggest that mental health status affects attitudes toward law enforcement and should be considered in future research and public policy.

This study set out to advance knowledge on the reporting of police shootings in print media. Media is the main source of information on criminal justice issues for most citizens. Thus, understanding the presentation of police-involved shooting incidents is important for determining the manner in which media might shape the opinions of readers.

The current study content analyzed relevant newspaper articles gathered from a large database of journalistic documents compiled by Lexis Nexis. Articles pertaining to police shootings published between January 1, 2014 and April 30, 2015, were identified and coded to document various dimensions of how these encounters are portrayed in print media.

Results indicate that explicit racialization of the stories was limited, which is contrary to what was expected. Neither the race of the suspect or officer was mentioned in most stories, making it difficult to assess explicit reporting bias of these incidents. However, results indicate that implicit bias might play a role in shaping the content portrayed in print news accounts of police-involved shootings.

The current study represents one of the first – if not the first – content analysis of news stories centered on police-involved shootings. Given the significant role media plays in delivering information about crime and justice topics to the citizenry, a working knowledge about the media’s portrayal of these events is important for understanding how media consumption may shape citizens’ opinions about police-involved shootings.

By making the explicit connections between the processes of urban-suburban racial transitions and Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows theory, this chapter proposes the linkage between concern for crime/disorder and anti-Blackness.

The contention is supported by recounting and highlighting key historical dynamics and their congruency with the original broken windows treatise; bringing in relevant research regarding racial coding and assumptions; surveys on residential mobility; and theoretical frameworks on colorblind racism.

The enduring popularity of broken windows theory is likely more due to its colorblind explanations of the suburbanization of urban Whites than to the explanatory merit of the theory. To explain the origin of such (problematic) concepts as “urban decay” and “crime-ridden communities,” the theory deflects concerns for determinative processes such as deindustrialization, integration, overpolicing, and historical anti-Blackness and provides a parable regarding a lack of vigilance in support of community norms, which in White communities have traditionally been segregationist. The moral of the parable is that “urban decay” is the result of Whites allowing desegregation to proceed after Brown v. Board.

This chapter provides a macro-discursive explanation for the popularity of broken windows theory and helps explain its centrality to the ongoing discussions regarding race, territorial and disorder policing, and practices such as stop-and-frisk.

This chapter examines how citizen journalism affects perceptions of legitimacy among local residents and police officers.

Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with residents and police officers.

Local residents are mostly willing to obey police commands, but a lack of trust in the police and fear of retaliation hinder willingness to cooperate with the police. Citizens’ willingness to follow police orders is mostly a way for them to end the encounter as quickly as possible so the contact will not extend for a prolonged period of time and cause even more serious consequences. Citizens have recorded the police in the past when they witnessed officers not following proper procedures. The police view citizens recording them as a form of defiance and while this makes policing challenging, police officers interviewed still hold high levels of self-legitimacy, most likely due to their organizational and occupational culture. Recording the police has emerged as a way for citizens to challenge police authority and legitimacy during encounters.

While recording the police has increased with recent technological advances, little empirical research has examined its impact on policing and police-community relations. This study connects three critical issues in policing – technology, citizen journalism, and police legitimacy – by assessing the impact of recording the police on police legitimacy in the eyes of the public and police officers. Not only does this study fill our gap in knowledge on citizens recording the police, but it also furnishes valuable implications for policy and future study.

The study explores the use of video to document police interaction with citizens and its role in the renaissance of a contemporary crisis focused on police use-of-force, race relations, and legitimacy in the United States. The saturation of communication technologies and network access have ushered an era of citizens watching the police, consolidating the new visibility of policing and potentially reorganizing to some degree the power dynamics of traditional police/community relations.

The argument is supported through a triangulated analysis that draws on several data sources about video technology use by both citizens and police, media coverage of police shootings, and public opinion on trends in police excessive force.

The institution of policing is experiencing a legitimacy crisis that is fueled by high-profile police shootings of African Americans by white police officers captured by video technology. The public increasingly expects access to video of police/citizen encounters, which redefines the public’s role in police accountability matters as well as the consequences for police legitimacy.

The theory illuminates the ways in which video has become central to public and official discourse in police use-of-force cases and the problems its presence and absence presents in police/community relations. The ability of citizens to record and widely share video of police encounters is a new development in the ability of citizens and police reform advocates to frame the discourse on police/community relations, accountability, and legitimacy.

The purpose of this chapter is to question the degree and the nature of legitimacy and force held by private security, and how this can affect the role private actors are playing in the field of policing and in the governance of security.

We draw mainly on existing academic literature on private policing, as well as our own qualitative research conducted in Canada.

If private security personnel have undeniably less legitimacy and force than their public counterpart, two nuances should be brought: (1) there is a tendency toward a shrinking of the gap between both sectors; and (2) these shortcomings do not represent such a problem, considering that, first, private security actors are usually given specific legal powers (e.g., the landlord’s), and, second, they do not rely on legitimacy as much as the police do in order to do their job. That being said, as private security officers and companies are likely to become increasingly involved in traditional police functions (most notably patrolling the public space), their lack of legitimacy and legal powers could significantly impede their actions in the future.

This chapter brings nuances to the supposed lack of force and legitimacy that plague the private security industry. It also sheds light on some of the inner rationales that characterize the dynamics within public and private policing.

Drawing on over two decades of studying and researching police recruitment, selection, and training, a correlation of the three prongs to professional policing in a democratic society is established.

The author overviews the current approaches to professional policing through an analysis of a statement made by a legendary chief of police August Vollmer, who is credited with the inception of the era of “professional policing.”

The transition from a young adult and inexperienced adult into a life-and-death decision maker needs to take into consideration a host of characteristics identified by Vollmer. These characteristics cannot be found nor honed within the current recruitment, selection, and training practices of American police departments.

This chapter provides an analysis of the required skills and characteristics necessary to hone and develop a professional police officer in a democratic society.