Arabella Kyprianides, Julia A. Yesberg, Jenna Milani, Ben Bradford, Paul Quinton and Oliver Clark–Darby
The range of tactical force options available to police is increasing, while public debate about police use of force is never far from the headlines. This paper aims to examine…
Abstract
Purpose
The range of tactical force options available to police is increasing, while public debate about police use of force is never far from the headlines. This paper aims to examine what factors shape how people accept police use of force.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use two online experiments to test whether different force options affected judgments about the acceptability of police action and to explore the role of trust and legitimacy in people's judgments.
Findings
The authors found across both studies that respondents judged scenarios involving a weapon (baton, CS spray, Taser) as less acceptable compared to scenarios that did not (talking down, handcuffs), but they did not draw much distinction between the specific weapon used. In study 1, exposure to different police tactics had no effect on trust and legitimacy. In study 2, prior perceptions of trust were strong predictors of acceptability judgments.
Originality/value
There is a comparative paucity of British-based empirical research examining public attitudes toward different use of force resolutions by police. In this paper, the authors explore how use of force affects people's views of police at a time in which the nature and scope of force applications, how these are understood and indeed the basic enterprise of policing itself is being reconsidered and renegotiated.
Details
Keywords
Ben Bradford, Jenna Milani and Jonathan Jackson
The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which police legitimacy and social identity explain variation in public acceptance of police use of force. The authors assess…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which police legitimacy and social identity explain variation in public acceptance of police use of force. The authors assess whether there is an association between legitimacy and public acceptance of apparently illegal or unethical police action; and the extent to which identification with a particular social group predicts judgments of police behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
The study draws upon cross-sectional data from a 2015 survey of a representative sample of adults in England and Wales. Structural equation modeling is used to model conditional correlations between latent constructs.
Findings
There are two main findings. First, identifying more strongly with a social group that the police may be seen to represent was consistently associated with greater acceptance of police use of force, whether or not that force seemed to be justified. Second, beliefs about the legitimacy of the police were also associated with acceptance, but primarily only in relation to the use of force in situations where it appeared prima facie justifiable.
Social implications
Results suggest one possible set of reasons why police retain public support in the face of scandals concerning excessive use of force.
Originality/value
This is one of only very few studies that have used survey data to explore lay justifications for police use of force.
Details
Keywords
Sebastian Roché and Guillaume Roux
Procedural justice (PJ) during police-citizen interactions has often been portrayed as a “silver bullet” to good policing, as it could function as a means to gain trust, voluntary…
Abstract
Purpose
Procedural justice (PJ) during police-citizen interactions has often been portrayed as a “silver bullet” to good policing, as it could function as a means to gain trust, voluntary obedience and public cooperation. PJ research is based on the assumption that there exists “true fairness.” However, it is still unclear what people actually mean when they evaluate the police as “fair” in surveys. By focusing the analysis to underexplored aspects of PJ, namely, the identity and political antecedents of the attribution of procedural fairness, the authors highlight the social and ideological reasons that influence people’s perceptions of police fairness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to explain the attribution of fairness of police, the study comprises a range of independent variables organized into five overarching domains: prior experience with police, victimization, socioeconomic status and (disadvantaged) context of residence, ethnicity and political attitudes and punitive values. The analysis is based on a representative sample of France, as well as a booster sample of a deprived, urban province (Seine-Saint-Denis) in order to better incorporate ethnic effects into the model (March 2011; n=1.498, 18+).
Findings
The present study finds support for the notion that aggressive policing policies (police-initiated contacts, e.g. identification checks, road stops) negatively impacts attributions of fairness to police. In addition, the findings show that attributions of fairness are not only interactional (i.e. related to what police do in any given situation) or related to individual cognitive phenomena, but for the most part pertain to broader social and political explanations. Political and ethnic cleavages are the key to understanding how police are judged by the public. The findings therefore question the nature of what is actually measured when fairness is attributed to police, finding that more punitive and conservative respondents tend to assess the police as fair. The authors find that the attribution of fairness seems to correspond to upholding the existing social order.
Research limitations/implications
This study has limitations inherent to any cross-sectional survey and the findings pertain only to a single country (France). Furthermore, the authors did not analyze all possible confounding variables to perceived fairness.
Social implications
The findings pose a practical problem for police and government to implement, as the authors ultimately find that there is no single recipe, or “silver bullet,” for being deemed fair across all social, ethnic and political groups – and, of course, the expectations of one group might conflict with those of another.
Originality/value
The study demonstrates that existing theory needs to better incorporate those explanations of fairness which extend beyond interactional processes with police, and refer instead to the social and political cleavages in society.