Promoting Muslims’ Willingness to Report Terror Threats to Police: Testing Competing Theories of Procedural Justice

Abstract

The heightened threat of terrorism in the West has resulted in more power being granted to police. However, new anti-terror laws and heavy-handed policing practices can stigmatize Muslim communities. Using survey data from 800 Australian Muslims this paper examines whether procedural justice policing in counter-terrorism enhances Muslims’ feelings of social inclusion, and promotes their intentions to report terror threats to police. Of interest is how procedural justice influences Muslims who feel less socially included. Three competing theoretical frameworks differ in the predictions they make about when and why procedural justice influences excluded groups. This paper considers each framework and discusses how each explains the relationships between our variables of interest. Our findings show that procedural justice is positively associated with social inclusion and intentions to report terror threats to police. Findings also show that social inclusion both moderates and partially mediates the effect of procedural justice on reporting intentions.

Keywords:

• procedural justice policing
• counter terrorism
• Muslims
• cooperation
• social inclusion

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the funding support of the Australian Research Council.

Notes

¹ There are some limitations with the sampling approach. Houses without listed telephone numbers were not within the sample population. In addition, some females that marry outside their faith and change their surname were also not within the sample population. However, as Muslims only comprise 2% of the overall population in Australia, this method of sample selection was considered the most reliable method to achieve a generally representative sample of Muslims in Australia.

² Our budget only catered for 800 completed surveys. Higher quotas were sought in Sydney and Melbourne given greater Muslim population sizes in these two cities.

³ A 4-item scale was also constructed to gauge whether participants felt like a member of a “suspect community” (“I feel under more scrutiny by police and authorities because of my faith”; “I feel under more scrutiny by the media and the public because of my faith”; “I sometimes feel police view me as a potential terrorist because of my faith”; “I sometimes feel the Australian public views me as a potential terrorist because of my faith”; Mean = 3.46; SD = .96). Each item was measured on a 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) scale, with a higher score indicating stronger feelings that one is a member of a suspect community. Importantly, this scale was negatively and significantly correlated with the social inclusion variable (r = −.31, p < .05), suggesting that those who felt more socially included felt less strongly that they were a member of a suspect community.

⁴ Muslims’ willingness to report general crime to police was also measured via a three item scale (e.g. “If the situation arose, how likely would you be to call the police to report a crime”; “Help police find someone suspected of committing a crime by providing them with information”; “Report dangerous or suspicious activities to police”; measured on a 1 = Very Unlikely to 5 = Very Likely response scale; Mean = 4.22; SD = .60; Cronbach alpha = .81); higher scores indicate greater intentions to report crime to police. A third regression was undertaken using Muslims’ intentions to report general crime to police as the dependent variable. As can be seen in Table A2 in Appendix A, a similar pattern of results was obtained for the crime reporting dependent variable as was found for the terrorism reporting variable. Procedural justice was the strongest predictor of intentions to report crime to police at Step 2 (β = .47), and the addition of social inclusion at Step 3 of the model partially mediated the effect of procedural justice on crime reporting intentions (Sobel test was significant; z = 2.24, p < .05). Like for terror reporting intentions, social inclusion also moderated the effect of procedural justice on crime reporting intentions at Step 4 (β = −.15). Simple slopes analyses again confirmed that procedural justice had a stronger positive effect on willingness to report crime for those lower on social inclusion (β = .48, p < .001), when compared to those high on social inclusion (β = .24, p < .001). In other words, procedural justice also appears to be more important to Muslims when reporting crime to police when they feel less certain about their social inclusion in society. So while respondents’ intentions to report general crime to police were much higher than intentions to report terror treats, the point to take away from this analysis is that the same effects were observed for both the terror reporting and crime reporting variables.

⁵ See Note 4 above.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristina Murphy

Kristina Murphy PhD is a Professor of Criminology at the Griffith Institute of Criminology and School of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Australia.

Adrian Cherney

Adrian Cherney PhD is an Associate Professor of Criminology and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Australia.

Marcus Teston

Marcus Teston was a 4th year Honours student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University, Australia.