When is policing fair? Groups, identity and judgements of the procedural justice of coercive crowd policing

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Procedural justice
• social identity
• policing
• crowds

Acknowledgement

Thanks to John Drury for reviewing an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Whilst it is possible that participants may have recognised the footage, it is unlikely due to the lack of specific contextual clues, the elevated vantage point and the fact that the footage was broadcast four years prior to the experiment. In any case such recognition is likely to have been evenly distributed across conditions and so should not have exerted any systematic bias to the data. Link to the video used: https://youtu.be/TCdlZ6MsbPU

2. https://www.callforparticipants.com

3. Our rationale for using ANCOVAs to analyse the data were twofold. Firstly, despite our random assignment, baseline measures of police legitimacy, F(2, 100) = 4.66, p < .05,  = .09, police community identity prototypicality, F(2, 100) = 5.63, p < .01,  = .10, and police community identity advancement, F(2, 100) = 6.58, p < .01,  = .12, were significantly different between conditions. Secondly, by maintaining baseline perceptions at a constant we can be more certain that any main effects were due to our manipulation. An exception was our community identification measure, where we analysed group differences using an ANOVA. Due to the abstract nature of this measure, we were, in a sense, already measuring people's baseline views and so this was entered as the dependent variable with no baseline equivalent included as a control variable.

4. For further details on the process macro, see http://processmacro.org/index.html

5. We acknowledge that some researchers argue that alternative methods such as constructing bootstrap confidence intervals is preferable to the use of Sobel tests for assessing the significance of indirect effects, especially with small sample sizes. If the bootstrap confidence intervals do not contain zero then we can be confident that the indirect effect is significant (Preacher and Hayes 2004). Bootstrap confidence intervals using 1000 bootstrap samples confirmed the significant indirect effect of relational identification with the police [.11 to .51] and that the indirect effect of community identification was not significant [−.11 to .03].

6. Newcastle United and Sunderland fans have a long-standing and intense footballing rivalry based, in part, on the proximity of the two cities in the North East of England.

7. Link to the video used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=63&v=xUhwn8R7Je4

8. Bootstrap confidence intervals using 1000 bootstrap samples again confirmed the significant indirect effect of relational identification with the police [.06 to .33] and that the indirect effect of community identification was not significant [−.01 to .05].