Abstract
Today, the majority of research has focused on legitimacy, while much less attention has been given to the sources of trust in the police. The current study constitutes one of the first empirical analyses that highlight the importance of examining the relationship between police authority and legitimacy in Brazil while aiming to understand the dynamics among those notions in relation to trust and obedience. The empirical part of the present study is conducted in the district of Jardim Ângela (Sao Paulo); once considered as the most violent urban region in the world. The final contribution lies in its focus on early adolescence as the particular age forms a crucial period in people’s legal socialization (Dirikx & Van den Bulck, 2014). Finally, the statistical analysis shows significant relationships between the frequency of obedience in laws and trust in the police.
Highlights
Police legitimacy is an important topic of criminological research, yet it has received only sporadic attention in societies where there is widespread police corruption, the position of the police is less secure, and social order is more tenuous Jackson et al 2014
Once their replies were collected and separated into groups, it was deemed that any lack of trust towards the police is largely caused by high levels of corruption and disobedience to the law (n = 188, 29.2%)
The second and third most popular responses were related to abuse of power (n = 172, 26.7%) and excessive violence (n = 88, 13.7%) followed by inefficiency and unavailability (n = 80, 12.4%). In these groups of answers, the youth often used improper language to express their feelings against the acclaimed “excessive shootings and killings of innocents” by police officers. These feelings were reflected in numbers when for the past year (2014) one out of five homicides in Sao Paolo were committed by the police (SSP, 2015)
Summary
Police legitimacy is an important topic of criminological research, yet it has received only sporadic attention in societies where there is widespread police corruption, the position of the police is less secure, and social order is more tenuous Jackson et al 2014. Poverty and social injustice are important factors that help explain the context in which police violence arises This is definitely a contributing factor to Brazil’s soaring rates of homicide, being amongst the highest in the world. The victims’ families wait from a failing criminal justice system to deliver justice and reparations for human rights violations; such killings are rarely investigated and brought to justice. Some of those deaths, along with other acts of violence, are caused in the course of massive raids into favelas (shanty towns).
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