Police Officers’ Self-Assessed Legitimacy: A Theoretical Extension and Empirical Test

Abstract

Researchers have recently begun to examine the sources and consequences of police officers’ self-assessed legitimacy, or the ways in which officers justify their authority to themselves. Important gains have been made, but this area remains in need of continued theoretical development. This study aims to further the theoretical and empirical analysis of police officers’ self-assessed legitimate authority. Data come from an officer survey distributed in a mid-sized department in the USA. Two conceptualizations and operationalizations of self-legitimacy are offered. Confirmatory factor analysis and ordinary least squares regression modeling are used to test the separability of the two constructs and to compare predictor domains. Results show that the two types of self-perceived authority are analytically distinct, and that workenvironment and organizational variables predict each type differently. The results have implications for future theorizing and testing of police self-legitimacy.

Keywords:

• Police self-legitimacy
• procedural justice
• police legitimacy
• police occupational attitudes
• organizational climate

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In addition to the two concerns described in the text, it appears from research conducted in developing nations that the importance of process-based evaluations of police might be unique to Western nations. Research conducted in African countries (Bradford, Huq, Jackson, & Roberts, 2014; Tankebe, 2008, 2009), Trinidad and Tobago (Kochel, Parks, & Mastrofski, 2013), South Korea (Woo, Maguire, & Gau, 2018), and China (Sun, Wu, Hu, & Farmer, 2017) suggests that in these countries, instrumental concerns about police effectiveness rival or even overshadow normative judgments about fairness in predicting citizens’ perceptions of police legitimacy. There is evidence, too, that the factor structure of the core constructs within the process-based model do not hold outside the West (Johnson, Maguire, & Kuhns, 2014).

2 Specifically, the agency employs 221 officers at the patrol-officer rank, 36 sergeants, and 14 lieutenants. In terms of command staff, there were seven captains, two assistant chiefs, and one chief.

3 Some data were missing. The two regression models contained 176 and 174 respondents, respectively, representing approximately 86% of the total sample. We therefore employed listwise deletion rather than multiple imputation, since imputation carries its own complications.

4 The survey contained a fourth item that we hypothesized would also tap into this form of self-legitimacy: “Police officers deserve more respect than other people.” We were forced to drop this item because it loaded poorly with the other three and reduced the quality of this self-legitimacy measure. As a check on the robustness of the results, all analyses presented here were rerun using the full four-item scale. There were no substantive changes compared to the three-item measure.

5 The item “It takes a special kind of person to be a police officer” did not load as well as the other two items, and dragged the alpha down slightly (alpha with this item deleted = 0.754). We ultimately retained this item, however, because of its theoretical relevance to the self-identification form of police self-legitimacy and because its misfit with the other two items was slight and did nothing to substantively alter the model’s fit to the data. Additionally, a supplemental regression model using a two-item scale with this item not included produced nearly identical results to the model using the three-item scale. We therefore present the regression results for the three-item scale as our final model.

6 It would have been preferable to divide race into more categories, such as black, Latino, white, and other. However, the sample size was modest and we therefore had to prioritize our independent variables. Since race was not a focal point of this present study, we opted to use the less-than-ideal method of dichotomizing white officers and officers of color.

7 As a check on the results, the OLS models were also run using robust standard errors to account for the skew in the dependent variables and any possible clustering effect that might be present due to the officers all being in the same department. The robust results substantively matched those with traditional standard errors.

8 All variance inflation factors were less than 2.0, indicating the absence of harmful collinearity between predictors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacinta M. Gau

Dr. Jacinta Gau is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on policing, with an emphasis on police–community relations and racial issues. Dr. Gau’s research has appeared in numerous academic journals, and she is the author of the books Criminal Justice Policy: Origins and Effectiveness (Oxford University Press) and Statistics for Criminology and Criminal Justice (Sage Publications).

Eugene A. Paoline

Eugene A. Paoline III is a Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. His research interests include police culture, police use of force, and occupational attitudes of criminal justice practitioners. He is the author of Rethinking Police Culture (2001, LFB Scholarly Publishing) and Police Culture: Adapting to the Strains of the Job (2014, Carolina Academic Press).