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Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. Research in Brief. National Institute of Justice.

Legal authorities gain when they receive deference and cooperation from the public. Considerable evidence suggests that the key factor shaping public behavior is the fairness of the processes legal authorities use when dealing with members of the public. This reaction occurs both during personal experiences with legal authorities and when community residents are making general evaluations of the law and of legal authorities. The strength and breadth of this influence suggests the value of an approach to regulation based upon sensitivity to public concerns about fairness in the exercise of legal authority. Such an approach leads to a number of suggestions about valuable police practices, as well as helping explain why improvements in the objective performance of the police and courts have not led to higher levels of public trust and confidence in those institutions.

Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law

Beginning with Koss, Gidycz, and Wisniewski’s pathbreaking study, the sexual victimization of female college students has emerged as salient research and policy concern. Building on this earlier work, we used a national, random sample of 4,446 female college students to focus on an issue of continuing importance: the level and determinants of victims’ willingness to report their sexual victimization. The analysis revealed that although few incidents—including rapes—are reported to the police and/or to campus authorities, a high proportion are disclosed to someone else (mainly to friends). Incidents were more likely to be reported to the police when they had characteristics that made them more “believable” (e.g., presence of a weapon or assailant who was a stranger). The use of alcohol and/or drugs by offenders and/or victims had a unique effect, causing students to be more likely to disclose their victimization to friends but not to campus authorities. The implications of the findings for extant debates a...

Reporting Sexual Victimization To The Police And Others: Results From a National-Level Study of College Women

Recent studies by police departments and researchers confirm that police stop persons of racial and ethnic minority groups more often than whites relative to their proportions in the population. However, it has been argued that stop rates more accurately reflect rates of crimes committed by each ethnic group, or that stop rates reflect elevated rates in specific social areas, such as neighborhoods or precincts. Most of the research on stop rates and police–citizen interactions has focused on traffic stops, and analyses of pedestrian stops are rare. In this article we analyze data from 125,000 pedestrian stops by the New York Police Department over a 15-month period. We disaggregate stops by police precinct and compare stop rates by racial and ethnic group, controlling for previous race-specific arrest rates. We use hierarchical multilevel models to adjust for precinct-level variability, thus directly addressing the question of geographic heterogeneity that arises in the analysis of pedestrian stops. We fi...

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An Analysis of the New York City Police Department's “Stop-and-Frisk” Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias

Exploring the relationship between procedural justice and citizen perceptions of police is a well-trodden pathway. Studies show that when citizens perceive the police acting in a procedurally just manner-by treating people with dignity and respect, and by being fair and neutral in their actions-they view the police as legitimate and are more likely to comply with directives and cooperate with police. Our article examines both the direct and the indirect outcomes of procedural justice policing, tested under randomized field trial conditions. We assess whether police can enhance perceptions of legitimacy during a short, police-initiated and procedurally just traffic encounter and how this single encounter shapes general views of police. Our results show significant differences between the control and experimental conditions: Procedurally just traffic encounters with police (experimental condition) shape citizen views about the actual encounter directly and general orientations toward the police relative to business-as-usual traffic stops in the control group. The theorized model is supported by our research, demonstrating that the police have much to gain from acting fairly during even short encounters with citizens.

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Shaping Citizen Perceptions of Police Legitimacy: A Randomized Field Trial of Procedural Justice

In this article two features of the theme police and the public are discussed. The first part deals with the public opinion of the police and how the police deal with the public. This is a well-documented issue, but only very generally related to 'policing'. The problem of dealing with the public arises in very similar terms in all administrations, public services and community services. The qualities expected of a 'front office' (speed, competence, confidentiality, etc.) are not peculiar to the police. On the other hand, the situation of a public policing service as an urban police force is currently very specific, has an unusual, virtually undocumented historical background and is therefore worth dealing with in much greater detail. This is done in the second part of the article. To grasp this role, one needs to consider the way in which the public police service has evolved in the last half-century. Admittedly, the situation in France has certain special features, but these are simply magnified versions of things which exist elsewhere. It may be true that the institutional background has precipitated developments in France, but that same background is present in all comparable countries.

Police and the Public

Ce que fait la police : sociologie de la force publique

Ce que fait la police

Dominique Monjardet : Die Berufskultur der Polizisten. Die verfugbaren Beschreibungen und Untersuchungen zur Berufskultur der Polizisten definieren diese Kultur als eine Gesamtheit von Eigenschaften, die in unterschiedlichen Grad von alien Mitgliedern der Gruppe geteilt wurden. Die empirischen Daten lassen im Gegenteil eine grosse Verschiedenheit von Meinungen, Haltungen und Werten durchblicken, die zu einem anderen Begriff der Berufskultur als gemeinsamen internem Raum fuhrt, der seinerseits durch zwei, der Polizistengruppe gemeinsame Forderungen definiert wird und uber die diese Gruppe tief geteilter Meinung ist : die Beziehung zum Gesetz und die Beziehung zum anderen.

La culture professionnelle des policiers

L'auteur justifie une sociologie de la profession policiere qui s'appuie sur une observation et une analyse du travail effectue par les policiers. Les resultats montrent que la qualification n'est pas donnee, mais qu'elle reste un enjeu dans les rapports sociaux internes a l'organisation. L'observation du travail renvoie au dilemme d'une competence definie comme un art a base de qualites individuelles et d' experience, ou comme une science (par l'apprentissage de connaissances formelles ). Le choix fait entre ces deux voies a des implications differentes sur l'organisation de la profession et son fonctionnement : mode de recrutement, conception de la formation.

Dominique Monjardet

Papers

Police and the Public

Ce que fait la police : sociologie de la force publique

Ce que fait la police

La culture professionnelle des policiers

Compétence et qualification comme principes d'analyse de l'action policière