Transcript PowerPoint - Scottish Institute for Policing Research

Using procedural justice to
encourage cooperation with the
police and compliance with the
law
Ben Bradford
Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research
Acknowledgements
 This presentation is based on a
programme of collaborative work.
 A number of different people are
involved, but three deserve particular
mention:
 Jon Jackson (LSE)
 Betsy Stanko (MPS)
 Mike Hough (ICPR)
 All the errors are of course mine!
Outline
 A bit of background.
 Public opinion and the police - ‘trust and
confidence’
 The idea of procedural justice
 Why do people cooperate with the
police?
 Is the legitimacy of the police linked to
compliance with the law?
 Closing thoughts
‘Trust and confidence’
 ‘Trust and confidence’ seems to be the term generally
used to summarise public support for police in the UK.
 And we’re talking here about the general public, not ‘offending’
populations.
 Classically, this has been measured by asking people
‘Taking everything into account, how good a job do you
think the police in this area are doing?”
 Opinions of the police are usually depicted as having
been in long term decline.
‘Trust and confidence’
 Police and government policies aim at halting or
reversing this decline:
 Reassurance policing.
 Neighbourhood policing.
 ‘Confidence agenda’.
 Increasing public confidence is desirable in and of itself.
 But another idea is that enhancing trust and confidence
will have other positive outcomes, such as increasing
cooperation and encouraging compliance.
 It is the legitimacy of the police that is most at stake.
 And there is some confusion about the meaning of all these
terms.
What do we mean by trust?
 Barber: trust involves expectations that:
 The world will continue more or less as it is - and the
behaviour of those we trust will serve to reproduce ‘the way
things are’.
 The people we trust will be technically competent in the
roles assigned to them.
 The people we trust will place our interests over their own
(in certain circumstances at least).
 Or Hardin:
 ‘To say we trust you means we believe you have the right
intentions toward us and that you are competent to do what
we trust you to do.’ (Hardin, 2006: 17)
Legitimacy
 “…a property of an authority or institution that leads people to
feel that it is entitled to be deferred to and obeyed.” (Sunshine
and Tyler 2003: 514)
 Political legitimacy grants the right to: “enforce commands
which cannot be countermanded, and to have a monopoly of
such legitimate enforcement”. (Barker 1990: 23)
 Beetham (1991): Legitimacy is always granted on the basis of
common shared values. Three dimensions must be fulfilled for a
power to be considered legitimate: its conformity to a set of
rules; the justifiability of these rules in terms of shared beliefs;
and the expressed consent of those governed or otherwise
affected by the power.
Linking trust and legitimacy
 So if enhancing trust and confidence in the police is
meant to lead to desirable ends in terms of legitimacy
- in terms of cooperation, deference and compliance what is the mechanism for this?
 What generates trust, why should it be linked to
legitimacy, and why does legitimacy lead to
compliance?
 The procedural justice model developed in the United
States by Tom Tyler and colleagues provides a robust
and empirically testable model for these processes.
Procedural justice
 In their dealings with legal authorities people value
just and decent treatment, and transparent and fair
decision making, over instrumental concerns and
concrete outcomes.
 Fair and decent treatment promotes feelings of
procedural justice and promotes motive-based trust.
These in turn increase the legitimacy of the authority
concerned
 Enhanced legitimacy leads to:
 Decision acceptance;
 Readiness to comply with instructions/orders;
 Compliance with the law
Procedural justice
 Procedural justice expresses shared group
membership. By and through the way in which they
treat people, police officers talk to them about their
inclusion and position within society.
 This idea links the model to sociological accounts of the position of
the police in British Society.
 The police are ‘proto-typical group representatives’, powerfully
symbolizing community, the law, nation and/or state.
 If procedural justice ‘works’ it would suggest
cooperation and compliance will be secured by
process-based styles of policing, which will
encourage people to see cooperating with the police
and obeying the law as the right things to do.
A (very) conceptual map
Decision acceptance,
satisfaction with
the decision maker
Procedural
fairness
Legitimacy
Cooperation
Compliance with
the law
Is policing all about procedural
fairness?
 Just as ‘trust and confidence’ encompasses questions
of competence and efficacy, police legitimacy must
rest in some part on how effective it is in its core
tasks.
 Similarly, compliance with the law can’t all be about
the legitimacy of legal authorities. Many other factors
must be in play:




The risk of detection and/or sanction
Personal morality
Opportunity
Psychological factors
Cooperation with the police
Police
effectiveness
Legitimacy
Police procedural
justice
Cooperation
Compliance with the law
Perceived risk of
sanction
Police
effectiveness
Compliance
Legitimacy
Police procedural
justice
Personal morality
with the law
‘Command and control’ policing
 Many of these other factors point toward command
and control styles of policing.
 This is the ‘significant other’ of the procedural justice model.
 When it comes to public opinion and action, we can’t
discount the importance of efficacy and deterrence.
 Cooperation with the police will be secured by police
demonstrating effectiveness.
 Compliance with the law will be secured by the
threat of being caught and convicted.
Command and control policing
 These different (competing?) models of policing might have
very different implications in terms of policing styles - and in
terms of cost.
 A key claim of Tyler’s work in the US is that ‘command and
control’ is only minimally effective. It doesn’t secure long-term
public commitment to the rule of law - and it’s expensive.
 But appealing to (and enhancing) the sense that police and
public share similar outlooks and goals might.
 CJS institutions that are seen as procedurally fair may secure
normative commitment to the rule of law.
 Further, fairness, dignity and respect are probably easier and
certainly cheaper to ‘do’.
Investigating these issues empirically
 We can use social survey data to investigate the links between
opinions of the police, legitimacy and cooperation/compliance.
 And compare the effect of procedural fairness with ideas about
effectiveness and the risk of sanction.
 Such surveys (obviously) rely on the answers people give:
 They will draw on many different sources when responding - personal
experience, what friends and family tell them, what they read in the papers
etc.
 It probably makes most sense to talk about people’s trust in
police fairness.
 But people do draw on what personal experience they have.
 Treat someone unfairly, and they will remember, and report lower
levels of trust in police fairness – their sense that the police are fair
will be undermined (and they will also tell their friends and family
about the experience).
Measuring trust and legitimacy
 We could just ask: “How much do you trust the
police to be fair?”, with answers on a Likert-type
scale (a lot; quite a lot; not a lot; not at all).
 But this would create many problems:
 It introduces measurement error.
 People have different understandings of words such as ‘trust’ and ‘fair’.
 Respondents will draw on an underlying attitude or orientation in order to
provide an answer - and it is this we are usually more interested in.
 A better way is to use some kind of latent variable
technique.
Latent Variables
 Answers to a series of survey questions are used to build up a
picture of an unobserved latent characteristic, orientation or
‘factor’ which influences the answers respondents give to the
different questions.
 Instead of asking “How much do you trust the police to be
fair?”, we might ask people to say how much they
agree/disagree with a range of statements such as:




“The police treat everyone fairly”
“If I had contact with the police they would treat me with respect”
“The police in this area are helpful”
Etc.
 Answers given can be combined and used in a variety of ways
to gain insight into the latent variables (or factors) which
underlie them, and the relationships between them.
Trust in police fairness
Police
fairness
Do you agree that the police in this area…
Factor Loading
Would treat you with respect if you had contact with them
.70
Treat everyone fairly regardless of who they are
.75
Are helpful
.79
Are friendly and approachable
.73
Legitimacy and cooperation
 Legitimacy can be thought of as residing in public assessments
of conformity to relevant rules, the justifiability of these rules in
terms of shared moral values, and expressions of consent to the
role of the police.
 We could operationalize police legitimacy in number of ways.
One way is to ask people about the extent to which they feel the
police share their own moral values, and the extent to which
they will defer to and cooperate with officers:
 ‘Moral alignment’
 ‘Duty to obey’
 ‘Propensity to cooperate’
 According to Beetham, ‘moral alignment’ should be the most
important component of police legitimacy.
 And according to Tyler, opinions about the fairness of the police should be
more strongly linked to legitimacy than opinions about police effectiveness.
Legitimacy and cooperation
Police legitimacy
Factor
loadings from
simultaneous
confirmatory
factor analysis
Cooperation with the police: How likely would you be to do the following things?
Call the police to report a crime occurring in your neighbourhood?
Help the police to find someone suspected of committing a crime by providing them with information?
Report dangerous or suspicious activities in your neighbourhood to the police?
Moral alignment with the police: To what extent do you agree or disagree that when you deal with the police in London:
The police usually act in ways that are consistent with my own ideas about what is right and wrong
The police can be trusted to make decisions that are right for people in my neighbourhood
My own feelings about what is right and wrong usually agree with the law
Obligation to obey: Please tell me to what extent you agree or disagree with each of these statements
You should do what the police tell you even if you disagree
You should accept the decisions made by police, even if you think they are wrong
You should do what the police tell you to even when you don’t like the way they treat you
0.96
0.90
0.95
0.94
0.95
0.86
0.92
0.94
0.86
Cooperation with the police
Police legitimacy:
moral alignment
.28
.55
Police procedural
Propensity to
.16
cooperate
justice
-.12
.67
.08
Police
effectiveness
Police legitimacy:
duty to obey
Source: London Metropolitan Police Public Attitudes Survey 2009/10
Legitimacy and compliance
 What about compliance with the law? That police fairness is
linked via legitimacy to compliance with the law is perhaps the
strongest claim of the procedural justice model - and potentially
the most powerful.
 We can only approximate these issues with social survey data.
 But there is relatively good evidence that asking respondents to
report on occasions that they have broken the law provides useful
information
 This allows us to plot relationships, even if we might not believe the
rates of offending reported.
 If Tyler’s model holds in the UK, we should find a stronger link
between perceptions of the legitimacy of the police and selfreported offending than between perceived risk of sanction and
offending.
Legitimacy and compliance
Measuring compliance with the law…..
 During the past 12 months, how often have you done
each of these things?




Illegally disposed of rubbish or litter ('fly tipping').
Committed traffic offences.
Vandalised public property.
Took something from a shop without paying for it.
Legitimacy and compliance
Measuring perceived risk of sanction….
 How likely do you think it is that you would be caught and
punished by being fined and/or arrested if you…




Illegally disposed of rubbish or litter ('fly tipping').
Committed traffic offences.
Vandalised public property.
Took something from a shop without paying for it.
… and personal (legal morality)
 How wrong do you think it is to do each of the following things:
 The same four offences.
Legitimacy and compliance
Perceived risk of
sanction
.29
Police
-.01
.11
effectiveness
-.25
Legitimacy
offending
.78
Police procedural
justice
Source: NPIA 2009
Self-reported
-.16
Personal morality
Implications
 So far, all the evidence suggests that the procedural
justice model ‘works’ in England and Wales - and
probably Scotland!
 By treating people fairly and respectfully, police
promote trust, enhance legitimacy and encourage
public cooperation and compliance with the law:
 Procedural fairness encourages people to believe that they
and the police are on the same side.
 Of course, treating people unfairly has the opposite effect.
 Procedural justice effects are far bigger than any
arising from ‘command and control’ styles - at least
as far as the majority of the public are concerned.
Further questions
 What about offenders?
 Does procedural justice ‘work’ for those heavily involved in crime - or who
are at risk of becoming so?
 What about BME and other minority groups, who might not feel
‘shared group membership’ with the police?
 Data limitations and the need for further studies.
 In particular, most existing UK data is cross-sectional, which means we
cannot yet properly untangle causal effects.
 I’ve caricatured ‘command and control’ - and surely for some
people, some of the time, effectiveness and instrumentality are
important? How do we account for this?
 The complexity of other factors involved in acts of cooperation
and compliance.
Some final thoughts
 How should we measure police performance in this
light of this emerging work?
 Is trust and confidence enough (obviously not, any
more - but should something replace it?)
 I would argue yes, but we should look at outcomes public cooperation, reporting rates, etc.
 These might give us insight into what should probably be
the ultimate aim of the CJS - not clearing up crimes that have
already occurred but working with other state and civil
institutions toward stopping crime occurring in the first
place.
Ben Bradford
Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research
University of Edinburgh
[email protected]