The Blurred ‘Blue line’: a cross-national comparison of the sources of public support for extralegal policing

ABSTRACT

Prior research addressing extralegal policing has focussed on the types of individuals most affected by these practices (i.e. disadvantaged minorities and police officers) as a means to improve conditions for these populations. Although these studies are critical for educating the public and informing criminal justice policy, there remains a noteworthy gap in the literature related to the types of political and sociocultural circumstances under which extralegal policing practices endure. The current study will mitigate this gap by addressing two theoretically-informed sources of public support (i.e. conflict and procedural justice theories) for police misconduct within the United States and Latin America. Analyses of three countries from the 2012 AmericasBarometer survey revealed a strong, ongoing presence of support for extralegal policing, with approximately one quarter of U.S. and Brazilian respondents and nearly half of Argentinian respondents expressing favourable views. While the analyses illustrated varying levels of support for conflict and procedural justice theory mechanisms, these findings highlight the importance of working to improve empirical understandings of public support for extralegal policing as a means to identify the contexts in which support is generated for both violent and non-violent police misconduct internationally.

KEYWORDS:

• Police
• social control
• extralegal justice
• procedural justice
• comparative criminology
• public opinion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The original sample size for the U.S. was 1,500, but the dependent variable of ‘support for EP aggression’ was only asked among half the sample (N = 750).

2 The FMI of the imputed model for Argentina (= 0.2697) was found to be high, but only on the measure for monthly income. Results for this model were substantively similar when run without the monthly income measure, indicating that these results are not an artifact of the multiple imputation method, even with a problematic diagnosis. Therefore, for the purposes of consistency and the theoretical importance of monthly income, this measure has been retained in the final imputed models for each included country.