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Research in Brief: Police Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and the Exercise of
Police Authority
Robert E. Worden, PhD, The John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, University at Albany,
SUNY, and Sarah J. McLean, PhD, The John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety
large body of survey research demonstrates that when people have contact with the
police, the fairness with which police are perceived to act affects citizens’ trust and
confidence in the police and their sense that the police deserve to be obeyed—that is,
procedural justice by police shapes police legitimacy and obligation. Procedural justice is a
matter of treating people with dignity and respect, giving them an opportunity to explain their
situations and listening to what they have to say, and explaining what police have done or will
do, so that it is clear that officers are taking account of people’s needs and concerns and
basing police decisions on facts. It is about not whether but how police exercise their
authority. From this body of evidence, it would appear that police can “create” legitimacy by
acting with procedural justice in their everyday encounters with citizens. As intuitive as this
might seem, previous research and the authors’ own study casts doubt on it. However, it was
also found that citizens’ perceptions of procedural justice are substantially affected by whether
or not they are searched without their consent, and that finding may have implications for how
police can nurture legitimacy.1
Research was conducted in two New York police departments: Schenectady and Syracuse.2
People who had recent contact with the police, including calls for service, stops, and arrests,
were surveyed on a semi-monthly basis over 18 months, with approximately 100 interviews
per month in each city. Since Schenectady police had long before installed dash-mounted
cameras in its patrol vehicles and instituted procedures for routine recording of police-citizen
encounters, the researchers also sampled recordings from among the 1,800 interactions for
which there were completed citizen interviews. Relevant features of the police-citizen
interactions were coded, using an observation protocol that built on the platform of more than
40 years of systematic social observation of police in the field. With these data, a measure of
officers’ procedural justice and a separate measure of officers’ procedural injustice were
formed. Because survey data on citizens’ subjective experience could be linked to trained
observers’ coding of officers’ and citizens’ behavior, encounter by encounter, the researchers
could, for the first time, analyze citizens’ subjective experience in terms of independent
measures of police behavior.
The research in Schenectady and Syracuse showed that the effects of police action on
citizens’ sense of procedural justice have more to do with whether police authority is
exercised than with how it is exercised.3 Together the behavioral scales of officers’ procedural
justice and injustice explained only 12 percent of the variance in citizens’ subjective
procedural justice in Schenectady. These findings may be, but should not be, surprising.
Previous research shows that citizens’ judgments about their contacts with police are shaped
by their prior attitudes toward the police: citizens who have positive attitudes toward the
police, in general tend to interpret their encounters with police favorably, while citizens with
negative attitudes tend to interpret their interactions with police unfavorably.4 These more
general attitudes, in turn, are affected by many factors. For example, citizens’ trust in social
institutions is subject to broad, long-term forces (e.g., post-material values).5 General attitudes
toward the police are influenced by the perceived level of social and physical disorder in one’s
neighborhood and the reputation of the local police (for good or ill).6
If the procedural justice of officers’ actions did not have strong effects on citizens’ judgments,
the exercise of police authority—and especially the authority to search—did. Citizens whose
persons or vehicles were searched (reportedly without their consent) were much less
favorable in their views of their encounters with police, regardless of the procedural justice
with which that authority was used. Nearly two-thirds of the citizens who were searched or
frisked considered the search illegitimate; three-quarters of the citizens whose vehicles were
searched considered the vehicle search illegitimate. Across both sites, the people who were
searched or frisked comprised 5 percent of the contacts, 13.2 percent of the people whose
procedural justice judgments were unfavorable, and 18.6 percent of those whose judgments
were most unfavorable. The people whose vehicles were searched comprised 2.6 percent of
the contacts and 7.8 percent of those whose procedural justice judgments were unfavorable.
On the 33-point survey index, a search or frisk reduced perceived procedural justice by about
6 points, other things being equal; a vehicle search reduced the score by about 4 points.7
Action Items
It might be possible to either prevent or repair the damage that searches—even legal
searches—apparently do to citizens’ attitudes. First, training in Rhode Island seems to have
reduced both the frequency of and racial disparity in discretionary searches and also
increased the productivity of searches. Recruit and inservice training curricula were revised to
include a new or amplified segment on community race relations, bias-free policing, and traffic
stop techniques. Rhode Island police appear to have conducted fewer searches without
forgoing the crime control benefits.8
Second, when police-citizen interactions involve frisks, searches, or the use of force, police
supervisors could follow up with the citizens and, based on their review of the reported actions
of the officers, contact the citizen to (a) explain that the supervisor had reviewed the actions
taken by the officers and found them to be proper; (b) explain the policies and procedures that
officers followed and the rationale for those policies and procedures; (c) invite the citizen to
ask questions or otherwise express their concerns about the incident; and (d) express their
interest in ensuring fairness and propriety in their officers’ performance and in citizens’
welfare. ♦
This project was supported by Award No. 2010-IJ-CX-0027, awarded by the
National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of
Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in this
article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the
Department of Justice.
Notes:
1Analysis also suggests that the use of physical force has similarly detrimental effects on
citizens’ judgments, but since the use of physical force is infrequent and the sample was
limited to 411 encounters, the estimated effect is not so reliable as to support the same
conclusion with similar confidence.
2See Robert E. Worden and Sarah J. McLean, Assessing Police Performance in Citizen
Encounters: Police Legitimacy and Management Accountability (Albany, NY: John F. Finn
Institute for Public Safety, Inc., 2014), http://finninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10
/Assessing-Police-Performance-in-Citizen-Encounters.pdf (accessed September 30, 2015).
3Worden and McLean, Assessing Police Performance in Citizen Encounters, chapter 8.
4See Steven G. Brandl et al., “Global and Specific Attitudes toward the Police: Disentangling
the Relationship,” Justice Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1994): 119–134; Dennis P. Rosenbaum et al.,
“Attitudes toward the Police: The Effects of Direct and Vicarious Experience,” Police Quarterly
8, no. 3 (2005): 343–365; Wesley G. Skogan, “Asymmetry in the Impact of Encounters with
Police,” Policing & Society: An International Journal of Research and Policy 16, no. 2 (2006):
99–126.
5Gary Orren, “Fall from Grace: The Public’s Loss of Faith in Government,” in Why People
Don’t Trust Government, eds. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Philip D. Zelikow, and David C. King
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6See Worden and McLean, Assessing Police Performance in Citizen Encounters, chapters 4
and 5. Also see, e.g., Michael D. Reisig, and Roger B. Parks, “Experience, Quality of Life, and
Neighborhood Context: A Hierarchical Analysis of Satisfaction with Police,” Justice Quarterly
17, no. 3 (2000): 607–630; Anthony A. Braga et al., “The Salience of Social Contextual
Factors in Appraisals of Police Interactions with Citizens: A Randomized Factorial
Experiment,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 30, no. 4 (December 2014): 599–627.
7A similar pattern was found in an analysis of similar survey data from a third city, 2001–2004;
see Robert E. Worden and Kelly J. Becker, “Police Searches, Procedural Justice, and
Legitimacy in Investigatory Stops” (presentation, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences 52nd
Annual Meeting, Orlando, Florida, March 6, 2015).
8Jack McDevitt, Janice Iwama, and Lisa Bailey-Laguerre, Rhode Island Traffic Stop Statistics
Data Collection Study (Boston, MA: Institute on Race and Justice, 2014),
http://www.nkpolice.org/documents/TRAFFIC%20STUDY%20RESULTS
/2014%20Traffic%20Stop%20Statistics%20FULL%20DATA.pdf (accessed October 2, 2015).
Please cite as
Robert E. Worden and Sarah J. McLean, “Police Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and
the Exercise of Police Authority,” Research in Brief, The Police Chief 82 (November
2015): 14–16.
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From The Police Chief, vol. LXXXII, no. 11, November 2015. Copyright
held by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 515 North
Washington Street, Alexandria, VA 22314 USA.
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