Making Every Police–Citizen Interaction Count

Abstract

Procedural justice policing is considered to be central to better policing (President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015). To implement procedural justice policing, police need to understand and build four key principles into their interactions with members of the public: (1) treating people with respect, (2) being neutral in their decision making, (3) conveying trustworthy motives, and (4) giving citizens a voice during the encounter. Drawing on these principles in a genuine manner underpins the quality of the dialogic interaction (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). It is not just enough to say polite things; the manner in which polite phrases and directives are communicated in both short and long encounters makes the difference between people believing the procedures used by police to reach an outcome are fair or not (Tyler, 2006 [1990]; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller, 2014).