Can a police-school partnership program balance legal socialisation and improve legitimacy?

Abstract

When people view legal authorities as legitimate, they are more likely to comply with laws and regulations. Perceptions of legitimacy can be improved when people experience procedurally just encounters with legal authorities. However, a procedurally unjust, negative encounter can negatively affect perceptions far more than a positive one. The purpose of this study is to examine whether or not a police-school partnership program, aimed at building trust and reducing truancy, can ‘balance’ the unstructured and inconsistent legal socialisation encounters that young people are likely to receive and thereby improve their perceptions of police and school legitimacy. I evaluated whether the effect of a police school partnership program on police and school staff legitimacy changes based on past legal socialisation events. I show that the partnership program improves perceived police legitimacy when participants had past unstructured encounters with police. However, I do not find any effect of the partnership program on school staff legitimacy, regardless of past unstructured encounters with school staff. I suggest that this is likely due to the fact that young people have continuous contact with school staff compared to discrete encounters with police. I conclude that procedurally just interventions to improve school staff legitimacy should be ongoing rather than one-off programs to combat this disparity in exposure.