Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing The Evidence (2004) / Chapter Skim
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8 Police Fairness: Legitimacy as the Consent of the Public
8 Police Fairness: Legitimacy as the Consent of the Public
Pages 291-326
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From page 291... ...
Perhaps most important, if the police are seen as legitimate, at least one of the threats that might concern citizens -- that they could be mistreated by the police as well as by criminals -- can be set aside. Second, police fairness is an end in itself.
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From page 292... ...
Perceptions regarding police fairness are created and sustained by the process of policing itself. This chapter examines the process by which police organizations attempt to garner legitimacy through efforts to make their operations more responsive to the felt needs of citizens.
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From page 293... ...
POLICE FAIRNESS 293 to have their particular encounter and do not necessarily expect to benefit from it. In general, people who call, flag down, or approach the police are more satisfied with what happened -- and with policing generally -- than are those who are pulled off the road or stopped by patrol officers while walking on foot.
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From page 294... ...
To implement deterrence strategies, police officers in the United States carry guns and clubs and can threaten citizens with physical injury, incapacitation, or financial penalties. Their goal is to establish their authority and "the uniform, badge, truncheon, and arms all may play a role in asserting authority" in the effort to "gain control of the situation" (Reiss, 1971:46)
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From page 295... ...
. The question is how much society is willing to invest in crime control, and how much power legal authorities will be allowed to have to intrude into people's lives.
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From page 296... ...
. An effective strategy for ensuring public compliance with legal authorities requires additional reasons for obeying the law (Tyler, 1990, 2003; Sherman, 1993, 1998, 2001)
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From page 297... ...
In this report we follow Weber in focusing on the internalization of the obligation to obey authorities, as opposed to the internalization of the responsibility to follow principles of personal values. This particular feeling of responsibility includes a willingness to suspend personal considerations of self-interest and to ignore personal values because an individual thinks that an authority or a rule is entitled to determine appropriate behavior in a given situation or situations.1 1Kelman and Hamilton (1989)
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From page 298... ...
The behavior of the officer in a particular situation can, in turn, influence this more generalized legitimacy of the police. The cyclical nature of this pattern brings out one of the potential virtues of community policing, in which community residents develop a longterm relationship with particular police officers.
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From page 299... ...
An example of such an approach is provided by Slobogin (1991; Slobogin and Schumacher, 1993) , who evaluates the intrusiveness of law enforcement searches and seizures using ratings derived from public opinion.
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From page 300... ...
, while blacks have about equal confidence in police and the Supreme Court (Roberts and Stalans, 1997)
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From page 301... ...
Procedural Justice and Legitimacy Another striking finding has resulted from research on police fairness: empirical studies suggest that the key to developing and maintaining the legitimacy of law and of legal authorities and to obtaining public cooperation lies in citizens' evaluations of the procedures through which legal rules are created and implemented. Studies of personal encounters with police officers and judges consistently suggest that people's attitudes, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by their sense of what is right and wrong, just or unjust (Tyler et al., 1997; Tyler and Smith, 1997)
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From page 302... ...
Procedural justice judgments are found to have an especially important role in shaping adherence to agreements over time. This is important in light of the reminder of Mastrofski, Snipes, and Supina (1996)
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From page 303... ...
The study further found that views about the legitimacy of the police, compliance with the law, and willingness to help the police control crime were all shaped by procedural justice judgments. These findings suggest that procedural justice is not just an issue to people during personal experiences with police officers.
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From page 304... ...
The second is that the police officers involved are seen as exercising their authority in fair ways. Tyler and Huo found that the procedural justice of police actions had an important role in shaping people's willingness to consent and cooperate with the police.
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From page 305... ...
As Mastrofski, Snipes, and Supina (1996:272) suggest, "although deference to legal authorities is the norm, disobedience occurs with sufficient frequency that skill in handling the rebellious, the disgruntled, and the hard to manage -- or those potentially so -- has become the street officer's performance litmus test." These researchers found an overall noncompliance rate of 22 percent; 19 percent of the time when the police told a person to leave another person alone; 33 percent of the time when the police told a person to cease some form of disorder; and 18 percent of the time when the police told a person to cease illegal behavior.
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From page 306... ...
. The increased legitimacy that restorative justice creates does not always reduce repeat offending, but four randomized experiments conducted by the Australian federal police suggest important dimensions of this idea.
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From page 307... ...
Many of the ideas outlined here are not only implications of a procedural justice or restorative justice approach to policing. They are also part of community approaches to policing.
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From page 308... ...
BUILDING LEGITIMACY THROUGH ORGANIZATIONAL REFORM As noted earlier, police organizations can enhance their legitimacy by demonstrating that they produce desired outcomes (e.g., reducing crime and disorder) , and that an even more powerful source of legitimacy is tapped when police fulfill public expectations about the processes of policing (e.g., treating people with fairness)
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From page 309... ...
If police organizations adopt structures because they are technically superior, key decision makers should place a high value on evidence of technical performance and base their decisions accordingly. There is some reason to believe that police agencies are increasingly paying attention to scientific evidence about what works (Weisburd et al., 2001)
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From page 310... ...
Creating special units to deal with specific problems is an especially useful way to deal with threats to the department's legitimacy, especially in locales where interest groups actively press police to tend to particular issues. In any city police department, leaders face a multitude of demands for new and different services but have limited resources with which to respond.
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From page 311... ...
Observers of community policing have also noted its resonance with community leaders and residents, as well as the remarkable speed in which it has spread during the last two decades. In the mid-1980s, community policing had little visibility among police or police researchers, but, by 1993, 98 percent of a national sample of the nation's local law enforcement chief executives agreed that "the concept of community policing is something that law enforcement agencies should pursue" (Wycoff, 1994)
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From page 312... ...
The Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Survey (LEMAS) surveys show a steady but slow increase in the percentage of fulltime officers who are Hispanic and black.
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From page 313... ...
. Another reason for focusing on individual agencies is that many authorities, including the law enforcement accreditation standards, argue that in the interest of building legitimacy the composition of a police department should reflect the community served (Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agen
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From page 314... ...
The employment of women officers lags far beyond the employment of racial and ethnic minorities. A total of 60 percent of all women were in the labor force in 2000, yet only a few law enforcement agencies have more than 20 percent female officers and most have only about 13 percent (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999; National Center for Women and Policing, 1998)
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From page 315... ...
, the number of police officers assigned (Illinois Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, 1991; Weicher, 1971; Lineberry, 1977; Nardulli and Stonecash, 1981)
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From page 316... ...
. Especially in a time of plummeting crime rates, it may be time to readdress these questions, with a special focus on how resource allocation decisions are actually made.
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From page 317... ...
Department of Transportation, trained local and state law enforcement officers to identify the characteristics of an illegal drug courier in a program called Operation Pipeline (American Civil Liberties Union, 1999)
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From page 318... ...
Initially some in the law enforcement community responded to charges of racial profiling by admitting that they considered race as one among many probabilistic factors of criminal activity by police (see Kennedy, 2001, for some examples)
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From page 319... ...
As noted earlier, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 authorizes the attorney general to investigate any "pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers...that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States." The consent decrees that have resulted from the threat of litigation have required the collection of data on departmental practices, and these data are unusually extensive. While police use of force has been the most common area of research, the consent decree governing operations of the New Jersey State Police require the collection of data on stops made by police, and a court ruled that these data revealed a significant disparity between white and black motorists.2 Documents discovered as the result of Department of Justice litigation also demonstrated that the New Jersey State Police believed themselves to be engaged in racial profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike.
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From page 320... ...
Despite these innovations, which clearly have beneficial application beyond racial profiling data collection, concerns persist both inside and outside the law enforcement community. Many argue that police will not be able to and should not be expected to record accurately the race of persons they stop and search, for often it is not obvious.
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From page 321... ...
. Lamberth testified that blacks constituted 13.5 3Some police, such as the San Jose Police Department, do establish a benchmark to measure their data collection against.
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From page 322... ...
While the survey and the police records included information on local police, the independent data collection, used in the construction of the denominator, was aimed exclusively at the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, and therefore it was to that police agency that the researchers confined their results. In order to create an appropriate denominator, the research team drove five miles over the speed limit on defined stretches at defined intervals during the day.
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From page 323... ...
The committee finds that current efforts to collect data on public encounters with police that are intended to inform judgments on whether police agencies engage in racial profiling are not very effective. The committee recommends further research on the collection and analysis of systematic data on the lawfulness of police activities.
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From page 324... ...
They have been adopted voluntarily by many law enforcement agencies and have been imposed by consent decrees in other agencies. Rigorous evaluations are required to determine if these programs effectively produce police accountability.
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From page 325... ...
Police agencies that do not comply with the provisions of this bill would lose funding from any or all of the following grant programs: the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Programs; the Cops on the Beat program under Part Q of Title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets; and the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant program of the Department of Justice. It remains to be seen whether either of these bills, which did not pass the 107th Congress, will be reintroduced and, if so, whether either garner more support.
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From page 326... ...
Some early intervention or early warning programs collect data on a broad range of officer performance measures. They have been adopted voluntarily by many law enforcement agencies and have been imposed by consent decrees in other agencies.
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