Abstract
ObjectivesTest the asymmetry thesis of police-citizen contact that police trustworthiness and legitimacy are affected more by negative than by positive experiences of interactions with legal agents by analyzing changes in attitudes towards the police after an encounter with the police. Test whether prior attitudes moderate the impact of contact on changes in attitudes towards the police.MethodsA two-wave panel survey of a nationally representative sample of Australian adults measured people’s beliefs about police trustworthiness (procedural fairness and effectiveness), their duty to obey the police, their contact with the police between the two waves, and their evaluation of those encounters in terms of process and outcome. Analysis is carried out using autoregressive structural equation modeling and latent moderated structural models.ResultsThe association between both process and outcome evaluation of police-citizen encounters and changes in attitudes towards the police is asymmetrical for trust in police effectiveness, symmetrical for trust in procedural fairness, and asymmetrical (in the opposite direction expected) for duty to obey the police. Little evidence of heterogeneity in the association between encounters and trust in procedural fairness and duty to obey, but prior levels of perceived effectiveness moderate the association between outcome evaluation and changes in trust in police effectiveness.ConclusionsThe association between police-citizen encounters and attitudes towards the police may not be as asymmetrical as previously thought, particularly for changes in trust in procedural fairness and legitimacy. Policy implications include considering public-police interactions as ‘teachable moments’ and potential sources for enhancing police trustworthiness and legitimacy.
Highlights
There is a good deal of evidence that police-citizen encounters are ‘teachable moments’, where people update their attitudes towards the trustworthiness and legitimacy of legal institutions based on their experience of officer behavior (e.g. Tyler et al 2014)
We extend the literature by presenting what is, to our knowledge, the first longitudinal test of the asymmetry thesis using a relatively comprehensive set of trustworthiness and legitimacy measures—i.e. we analyze whether police-citizen encounters are associated with changes in satisfaction with police when compared to respondents who did not experience contact between two waves of data
By: (a) analyzing panel data to account for changes in attitudes as suggested by Skogan (2012) and Tyler and Fagan (2008); (b) unpacking police trustworthiness into different dimensions of trust in procedural fairness and police effectiveness and including measures of police legitimacy as suggested by Bradford et al (2009) and Jackson et al (2012); (c) considering process and outcome as two different dimensions of contact evaluation as suggested by Tyler and Fagan (2008) and Bradford et al (2014); and (d) adopting a more appropriate measurement model to account for an unobserved heterogeneity of contact evaluation wherein three rather than two categories emerge—we find some quite strongly symmetrical relationships between police-citizen contact and attitudes towards the police
Summary
Test the asymmetry thesis of police-citizen contact that police trustworthiness and legitimacy are affected more by negative than by positive experiences of interactions with legal agents by analyzing changes in attitudes towards the police after an encounter with the police. Test whether prior attitudes moderate the impact of contact on changes in attitudes towards the police. Methods A two-wave panel survey of a nationally representative sample of Australian adults measured people’s beliefs about police trustworthiness (procedural fairness and effectiveness), their duty to obey the police, their contact with the police between the two waves, and their evaluation of those encounters in terms of process and outcome. Analysis is carried out using autoregressive structural equation modeling and latent moderated structural models
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