Bounded authority: expanding ‘appropriate’ police behavior beyond procedural justice

This paper expands previous conceptualizations of appropriate police behavior beyond procedural justice. The focus of the current study is on the notion of bounded authority – i.e. acting within the limits of one’s rightful authority. According to work on legal socialization, US citizens come to acquire three dimensions of values that determine how authorities ought to behave: (a) neutral, consistent and transparent decision-making; (b) interpersonal treatment that conveys respect, dignity and concern; and (c) respecting the limits of one’s rightful power. Using survey data from a nationally representative sample of US adults, we show that concerns over bounded authority, respectful treatment, and neutral decision-making combine to form a strong predictor of police and legal legitimacy. We also find that legal legitimacy is associated with greater compliance behavior, controlling for personal morality and perceived likelihood of sanctions. We discuss the implications of a boundary perspective with respect to ongoing debates over the appropriate scope of police power and the utility of concentrated police activities. We also highlight the need for further research specifically focused on the psychological mechanisms underlying the formation of boundaries and why they shape the legitimacy of the police and law

Legitimating practices: revisiting the predicates of police legitimacy

Procedural justice theory predicts a relationship between police behaviour, individuals’ normative evaluation of police and decisions to comply with laws. Yet, prior studies of procedural justice have rather narrowly defined the potentially relevant predicates of police behaviour. This study expands the scope of procedural justice theory by considering a broad array of policing components, including unobserved actions such as electronic surveillance, respecting the limits of one’s legal authority, and the unequal or equal distribution of policing resources between different groups. Analysing data from a national probability sample of adults in England and Wales, we (1) present a comprehensive investigation of the heterogeneous elements of policing related to legitimacy judgments and (2) contribute to debate about the nature of legitimacy

Where did it all go wrong? Implementation failure - and more - in a field experiment of procedural justice policing

Objectives: This paper presents the findings from a retrospectively conducted qualitative process evaluation to the Scottish Community Engagement Trial (ScotCET). The study explores the unanticipated results of a randomised field trial testing the effect of ‘procedurally just’ modes of road policing on public perceptions of police. The ScotCET intervention failed to produce the hypothesised results, producing instead significant, and unexplained, negative effects on key aspects of public perception. The present study seeks to examine, from the perspectives of officers implementing the experiment, what the impacts (intended or otherwise) of participation were. Methods: Group interviews were held within the ScotCET experiment ‘units’ to explore how officers had collectively interpreted and framed ScotCET, and responded as a group to its requirements/ demands. Nine groups were held over a 5 month period post experiment completion. Results: Findings indicate that communication breakdowns during the ScotCET implementation led to misunderstandings of its aims and objectives, and of the requirements placed on officers. Within a context of organisational reform and perceived organizational ‘injustice’, commonly cited aspects of police culture were invoked to facilitate officer non-compliance with aspects of the experimental intervention, leading to implementation failures, and, possibly, a diffuse negative effect on the attitudes and behaviours of experiment officers. Conclusions: Organizational structures and processes, and coercive top-down direction, are insufficient to ensure successful implementation of policing research, and, by implication, policing reforms, particularly those that demand alternative ways of ‘doing’ policing and ‘seeing’ citizens. Greater investment in organisational justice and encouraging openness to evidence-led knowledge is needed to promote change

The interaction between universal service costing and financing in the postal sector: a calibrated approach

Universal service obligation, Sharing mechanism, Compensation, Postal sector, L51, L87,

Police procedural justice and adolescents' internalization of the law: Integrating self‐determination theory into legal socialization research

The procedural justice model is a common framework for understanding how and why fair procedures conveyed by legal authorities (such as police officers) shape the legal socialization process. The present contribution draws upon self-determination theory (SDT) to advance the procedural justice model through its focus on internalization, in terms of identification and external regulation. Study 1 is a questionnaire-based study conducted among 268 Belgian adolescents that provides initial evidence for the incremental value of the SDT-based operationalization of internalization, above and beyond the classic operationalization (i.e., obligation to obey), for explaining why perceived procedural justice is linked to more compliance and less defiance. These results are corroborated in Study 2, which involves an experimental, vignette-based study (N = 210) contrasting a procedurally just versus unjust situation. The discussion focuses on how SDT may inform the legal socialization literature

Legal Attitudes and Legitimacy: Extending the Integrated Legal Socialization Model

Legal socialization is the process by which individuals acquire beliefs about rules and rule-violation by internalizing codified, normative rules within society. In the integrated legal socialization model, legal attitudes are mediators between legal/moral reasoning and rule-violating behavior (RVB;Cohn, Bucolo, Rebellon, & Van Gundy, 2010). In the alternative legal socialization model, legitimacy of authority is a predictor of RVB (Piquero, Fagan, Mulvey, Steinberg, & Odgers, 2005). In the current study, we attempted to replicate Cohn et al.\u27s (2010) integrated model. A path model revealed that legal attitudes (normative status) mediated the relationship between legal reasoning and RVB in partial support of the integrated model. We then expanded the theoretical model by arguing that police and parental legitimacy mediated between moral/legal reasoning and normative status (approval of RVB). We used longitudinal data from middle school and high school students to test our expanded theoretical model. Our final path analysis revealed partial support for our expanded model by demonstrating that legal (but not moral) reasoning was associated with both parental and police legitimacy—which were associated with RVB via the mediating influence of legal reasoning (normative status). We conclude by discussing the policy implications of the expanded legal socialization model as well as our suggestions for future research