Abstract
ObjectivesTest whether cooperation with the police can be modelled as a place-based norm that varies in strength from one neighborhood to the next. Estimate whether perceived police legitimacy predicts an individual’s willingness to cooperate in weak-norm neighborhoods, but not in strong-norm neighborhoods where most people are either willing or unwilling to cooperate, irrespective of their perceptions of police legitimacy.MethodsA survey of 1057 individuals in 98 relatively high-crime English neighborhoods defined at a small spatial scale measured (a) willingness to cooperate using a hypothetical crime vignette and (b) legitimacy using indicators of normative alignment between police and citizen values. A mixed-effects, location-scale model estimated the cluster-level mean and cluster-level variance of willingness to cooperate as a neighborhood-level latent variable. A cross-level interaction tested whether legitimacy predicts individual-level willingness to cooperate only in neighborhoods where the norm is weak.ResultsWillingness to cooperate clustered strongly by neighborhood. There were neighborhoods with (1) high mean and low variance, (2) high mean and high variance, (3) (relatively) low mean and low variance, and (4) (relatively) low mean and high variance. Legitimacy was only a positive predictor of cooperation in neighborhoods that had a (relatively) low mean and high variance. There was little variance left to explain in neighborhoods where the norm was strong.ConclusionsFindings support a boundary condition of procedural justice theory: namely, that cooperation can be modelled as a place-based norm that varies in strength from neighborhood to neighborhood and that legitimacy only predicts an individual’s willingness to cooperate in neighborhoods where the norm is relatively weak.
Highlights
Security cannot be produced by either police or citizens acting alone
Why might legitimacy be related to willingness to cooperate only when the norm to cooperate is weak? First, living in a neighborhood with a strong norm to cooperate with police is likely to lead to internalisation of that social norm, and we propose that this more proximate group-level force over-rides the effect of individual perceptions of police legitimacy, i.e. most people will be willing to cooperate precisely because it is the right and expected thing to do, irrespective of what they think about the legitimacy of the police
Neighborhoods are ranked by the mean score on the three cooperation measures, with the middle 50% of individual scores shown by the thick grey bars and the full range given by the capped bars
Summary
Legal authorities rely on the public to report crimes, provide intelligence and give evidence in court, and it is important to put into place policies and practice in ways that secure active public support if the police, criminal courts and correctional facilities are to effectively fight crime and maintain social order. Procedural justice theory (PJT; Tyler and Huo 2002; Tyler and Fagan 2008) is a popular account of police-citizen relations aimed at understanding what police officers can do to encourage public cooperation and legal compliance. An instrumental account of cooperation stresses a more coercive style of policing, whereby officers encourage cooperative behaviour by wielding their authority in ways that signal effectiveness, protection, strength and power. A normative account of cooperation stresses consensual social control practices— officers encourage proactive public support by acting in ways that signal respect, neutrality, accountability and moral authority
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