Justice-restoring responses: a theoretical framework for understanding citizen complaints against the police

ABSTRACT

In an effort to provide a theoretical framework for understanding citizens’ decisions to complain about the police, this paper suggests that citizen complaints can be viewed as a justice-restoring response and tests six hypotheses using a factorial vignette experiment. The findings indicate that individuals are more likely to complain when they perceive the interaction as procedurally unfair, distributively unfair, and when the outcome is unfavourable. Positive pre-existing attitudes towards the police result in an increased likelihood of engaging in a justice-restoring response. Despite drawing on Tyler’s legitimacy theory, these findings differentiate justice-restoring responses from legitimacy by the comparatively greater impact of outcome favourability and the differing direction of the effect of pre-existing attitudes towards the police.

KEYWORDS:

• Police complaints
• procedural justice
• justice-restoring responses
• outcome favourability

Acknowledgments

The research presented in this article was conducted as part of the author’s dissertation. An earlier version was presented at the 74th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Atlanta, GA. The author would like to thank Scott Wolfe, Justin Nix, and Geoff Alpert for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this work. All errors remain the authors’ responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a detailed review, see Hickman and Poore (2016).

2 Studies of online convenience samples have generally found a considerable ability to replicate findings from general population studies (Mullinix et al. 2015, Weinberg et al. 2014). Several studies in criminology have previously used data from panels of online participants to obtain samples of the general public (e.g., Dum et al. 2017, Moule et al. 2019, Rydberg et al. 2018).

3 That is, the demographic breakdown of the sample is consistent with the US Census’ estimates on age, race/ethnicity, and gender (See Table 1).

4 Italicised words in this section are used to indicate how the variable is identified in Tables and Figures.

5 Many jurisdictions now have an external, third-party avenue for filing a complaint against the police (Porter and Prenzler 2016). That is, complainants can file complaints with government agencies that are not the police department. This is intended to make complaints easier to file, as the individual does not have to complain about the police to the police department. While this agency may vary in name by jurisdiction (e.g., Citizen Review Board, External Oversight Board, etc.), including a third-party agency as an option may increase the likelihood of response. For this reason, local government was included as a potential avenue for citizens to complain.

6 To be clear, this is not comparing standardised coefficients across models, but comparing the relationship between within-model coefficients across models.