Does Procedural Justice Leads Towards the Feelings of Compliance, and Cooperation With, and Empowerment of Law Enforcement Agencies in Pakistan: The Mediating Role of Moral Solidarity between Police and Community

Abstract

Purpose/Objective: The aim of this paper is to identify why or why not police get support and cooperation from the public. Relational models of authority argue that people evaluate the degree to which the police reflect the group's moral values by assessing the fairness of the procedures they use to exercise their authority. Moreover, as per the social identity approach, people's cooperation with the police is motivated in part by their judgment that the police are prototypical representatives of the group's moral value. Combining both approaches in a single theoretical framework, we applied Sunshine & Tyler (2003) model, on citizens’ feelings about Pakistani Law enforcement agencies (LEA). In this, we hypothesized that procedural justice aligned police and citizen moral values in form of moral solidarity. This moral solidarity in turn effect LEA’s effectiveness through increased cooperation from citizens as their feelings of Compliance and Cooperation with LEAs increased along with the people’s will to give power to them. Methodology/Design: Empirical validity was established by conducting a survey using a close-ended questionnaire. Data was collected from 296 citizens of Karachi and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. The study has used a nonprobability purposive sampling technique while data was analyzed employing PLS-SEM using Smart PLS version 3.2.8. Findings: The results showed that moral solidarity has a positive significant effect on orientation towards policing, whereas procedural justice has a significantly positive effect on moral solidarity and orientation towards policing. Moreover, moral solidarity has a complementary mediating effect between procedural justice and orientation towards policing. Findings also showed that moral solidarity alone as well as along with Orientation towards Policing seems to have a significant and positive mediation in the effect of justice on compliance, cooperation and empowerment. Implications: Community policing encourages that, instead of the incident-oriented method that has continued to dominate in tandem with the professional model, the problem-solving attitude of police be embraced.