Measuring Procedural Justice in Police-Citizen Encounters

Abstract

Procedural justice has dominated recent discussions of police interactions with the public. It has mostly been measured from the perspective of citizens (using surveys or interviews), but several important questions about predictors and outcomes of fair police treatment are best answered using direct observations of police-citizen interactions. Building on prior observational studies, we develop and validate an instrument for measuring procedural justice as it is exercised by the police in the natural setting of their encounters with the public. In doing so, we adopt a “formative” rather than the common “reflective” approach, based on the assumption that specific behaviors that make up procedural justice do not reflect a single underlying construct but rather form one. We justify this approach and validate our instrument accordingly. We also discuss the implications of our measurement for future research on procedural justice in police behavior.

Keywords:

• legitimacy
• procedural justice
• policing
• formative measures

Notes

1 Four of the officers were identified by their peers in an earlier part of the study as high performers. The rest were selected randomly from the remaining pool of patrol officers. The high performers are over-represented in the sample. However, since the goal of this analysis is to construct and validate an instrument for measuring procedural justice rather than identifying its causes, this over-representation does not pose a problem.

2 The R²s were calculated by specifying each of the four sub-indices as the dependent variable in a regression model where the remaining three were the predictors. The VIFs were then calculated using the R² values [1/1 – R²)].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tal Jonathan-Zamir

Tal Jonathan-Zamir is a lecturer at the Institute of Criminology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed her PhD at the Hebrew University in 2010 and spent a year as a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University. Her research interests include police-community relationships, police legitimacy, and policing terrorism.

Stephen D. Mastrofski

Stephen Mastrofski is university professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and director of the Center for Justice Leadership and Management at George Mason University. His research interests include police discretion, police organizations and their reform, and systematic field observation methods in criminology.

Shomron Moyal

Shomron Moyal completed his PhD in Criminology at the Hebrew University in December 2012. He is currently a Fulbright-ISEF post-doctoral fellow at the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology and the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include disobedience to law and political violence, countries’ adherence to the “rule-of-law” principle, and inter-judge sentencing disparity.