When is policing fair? Groups, identity and judgements of the procedural justice of coercive crowd policing
- 23 September 2016
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Policing and Society
- Vol. 28 (6), 647-664
- https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2016.1234470
Abstract
Procedural justice theory (PJT) is now a widely utilised theoretical perspective in policing research that acknowledges the centrality of police ‘fairness’. Despite its widespread acceptance this paper asserts that there are conceptual limitations that emerge when applying the theory to the policing of crowd events. This paper contends that this problem with PJT is a result of specific assumptions that are highlighted by two studies using a novel experimental approach. Study 1 systematically manipulated the social categories used to describe crowd participants subjected to police coercion. The experiment demonstrates how these social categories dramatically affected participants’ perceptions of the same police action and that it was participants’ relational identification with the police, rather than a superordinate category, that mediated the association between judgements of procedural fairness and intentions to cooperate. In Study 2, using a quasi-experimental design, we then replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating how perceptions of procedural fairness are also influenced by levels of in-group identification. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the data for reconceptualising the social psychological processes mediating these judgements and impacts of police legitimacy.This publication has 45 references indexed in Scilit:
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