The thin blue line meets the big blue sky: perceptions of police legitimacy and public attitudes towards aerial drones

Abstract

Police departments across the United States are now integrating new visual monitoring technology (e.g. unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs or ‘drones’], body cameras) into routine police practices. Despite their potential use in multiple areas of proactive and reactive policing, public attitudes toward police use of UAVs, and visual monitoring technology overall, is mixed. As an extension of previous research, the current study uses a national survey to assess how well individuals’ perceptions about police legitimacy, effectiveness, and other criminal justice attitudes predict the level of public receptivity and opposition toward police UAV use in various contexts. The implications of these findings for public policy and law enforcement practices are discussed.

Keywords:

• Unmanned aerial vehicles
• police
• police legitimacy
• visual police technology

Notes

1. Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/), owned by Amazon.com, is an online source for data collection that provides over 500,000 eligible respondents for experimental and electronic survey research (Ipeirotis, 2010; Paolacci & Chandler, 2014). Previous research that has examined the representativeness and validity of Mechanical Turk has found that samples are ‘at least as representative of the US population’ and ‘at least as diverse and more representative of non-college populations’ (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011, p. 5; Paolacci, Chandler, & Ipeirotis, 2010, p. 414). In addition, Mechanical Turk has been found to produce a sample with ‘specific attributes that are often within a 10% range of their corresponding values in the US population’ (Heen, Lieberman, & Miethe, 2014, p. 6).

2. Items used to construct police legitimacy scale were adapted from Tyler (2005) and Hinds and Murphy (2007).

3. Items used to construct police effectiveness scale were adapted from Tyler (2005) and Hinds and Murphy (2007).

4. Mesa County implemented a fully functional UAV program in 2010 that allows the department to assist with aerial photos of fatality crashes, providing hot spot sensing and aerial photos of fire damage to assist in arson investigations, aerial crime scene photography, search and rescue missions and locating dangerous fugitives. Similarly, Grand Forks County Sheriff’s office in North Dakota (which implemented its UAV program in 2013) has used UAVs primarily for missing person search and rescue operations, active searches for suspects, photographing crime scenes and assessing natural disaster situations.