Procedural justice and police legitimacy: untangling the effects of race/ethnicity-based situation and organizational characteristics of police agency
Date
2018
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In the 21st century, law enforcement agencies have increasingly realized the importance of police-civilian contacts in shaping public evaluations of legal authorities. Empirical evidence has shown a strong linkage between procedural justice embedded in police-civilian contacts and public views of the police as legitimate institutions. Although racial disparities have been found in public perception of the police with African Americans being the most critical group of the police, studies have rarely investigated the possible influences of race/ethnicity-based situations, defined mainly by the nexus of civilian and officer race and ethnicity, on police legitimacy. Besides, prior studies have seldom taken police organizational variations, such as internal procedural justice and policing strategies, into consideration when assessing public views of police legitimacy. This dissertation attempts to address these voids in the existing literature. ☐ Using the Police-Community Interaction Survey (PCI) and the Law Enforcement Organizations Survey (LEO) of the National Police Research Platform Phase II, 2013-2015, the current study assesses the effects of the nexus of officer race and civilian race/ethnicity, as well as police internal procedural justice and policing strategies, on public perceptions of procedural justice and police legitimacy. More than 5,000 traffic stops from forty-eight police agency are included in the analysis. A large sample size and the merging of two datasets allowed the construction of a comprehensive combination of officer and civilian race and ethnicity and the test of multilevel impacts on public evaluations of the police. The primary statistical approaches include factor analysis, multivariate regression analyses, and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). ☐ The major findings of this study are: Black civilians were less likely to perceive the police procedurally just and legitimate than White civilians; this Black-White divide in perceptions widens in encounters involving Black civilians and White officers and the negative effect of this racial combination on perception of police legitimacy is partially mediated by procedural justice; Hispanic civilians perceived White officers to be more legitimate compared to their White counterparts, and procedural justice enhances such relatively positive effect. These findings highlight the importance of procedural justice in developing a health police-public relation, advance our knowledge of the complexities of race/ethnicity in shaping civilians’ perceptions of police, and inform police administrators of potential organizational reforms to enhance police legitimacy.
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Keywords
Social sciences, Internal procedural justice, Organizational characteristics, Police department, Police legitimacy, Procedural justice, Race and ethnicity