Social context in police legitimacy: giving meaning to police/community contacts

ABSTRACT

The history of policing in the United States is a history of tension between the police and the public, especially in marginalised communities, where the legitimacy of the police and their interventions has been most questioned. Marginalised and often minority communities often complain about over and under policing, that is, policing that harasses local residents but does not address serious crime. In recent years, concerns with the institutional legitimacy of the police in the US and elsewhere have risen in public discussions and in scientific research. Current models of police legitimacy tend to focus on transactions between the police and the public over matters of procedural justice; however, taking a more contextual view of police interventions in communities provides opportunities to look beyond transactions and sort out the socio-cultural acceptance of the police against the myriad of services they provide to communities. Here we focus on census tracts in Boston, merging calls for service data with perceptual survey data. We find significant differences in the types of police services requested by advantaged and disadvantaged communities. Public-initiated calls for service are largely for emergency response matters as opposed to crime prevention and community restoration; police-initiated services, however, are more evenly distributed across prevention, response, and restoration. While residents of disadvantaged, high-crime communities request the police more often, they perceive themselves as unwilling to report crime. Additionally, they perceive their communities as unsafe while also viewing the police as less legitimate.

KEYWORDS:

• Concentrated disadvantage
• neighbourhood context
• police services
• police legitimacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Excluded from the provided file were sex crimes, as the address of the crime and/or victim was part of this analysis; therefore, the confidentiality of these calls was protected.

2 While the City of Boston is comprised of 181 tracts, 14 were excluded as they are large special land use areas (e.g. National Parks, military installations), contain only water area, or in one instance, is partially located in a nearby city (Revere, MA). There is also one census tract in which no residents participated in the Boston Neighborhood Survey; therefore, the final sample size is 166 Census tracts.

3 This selection process utilized a list-assisted sampling frame, with separate random probability samples for each of Boston’s 16 BRA-defined neighbourhoods proportional to their population size.

4 While the survey was ultimately conducted in three waves (2006, 2008, and 2010) with different participants in each, for the purposes of this analysis, only respondents from 2010 were selected. This timeline best aligns with the cross-sectional 2011 CFS data.

5 For confidentiality purposes, respondents’ addresses were deleted upon matching with a Census tract. Although the survey was conducted in 2010, these addresses were linked to 2000 Census tracts. To better align the BNS with the 2011 CFS data, BARI translated the tract-level survey scales to 2010 Census tracts using the Longitudinal Tract Data Base (see Logan et al. 2014).

6 The CFS codes, and their recoding into these three categories, are available from the corresponding author upon request.