Perception of the police amongst migrant teenagers from Muslim majority countries in Western European host countries

ABSTRACT

This paper compares migrants from Muslim majority countries (MMC) with Western European native-born school-children in terms of trust in the police, legitimacy conferred on police and compliance. The results show that migrants from MMC tend to trust and legitimate the police in their host country less and, as a result, to report lower levels of normative compliance. However, they report higher levels of habitual compliance than native-born respondents. Measures of structural conditions (i.e. deprivation and disorganisation) and of closeness to the host country (i.e. attachment to school and collective efficacy in neighbourhood) mediate these differences but do not eliminate them. Explanations for the differences in attitudes to the police are suggested in terms of group-level cultural distance and quality of integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Procedural justice theory
• group position perspective
• ISRD3
• migrants from Muslim majority countries

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mike Hough who kindly provided suggestions on earlier versions of this paper and helped me with English-language editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The author operationalises superordinate identification through two agreement items, namely ‘You want to think of your children as South African’ and ‘You think it is desirable to create one united country’ (Tyler 2009, p. 34).

2 The authors measure superordinate identification through four agreement items, namely ‘I see myself as a member of the Scottish community’, ‘It is important to me that others see me as a member of the Scottish community’, ‘I see myself as an honest, law-abiding citizen’, and ‘It is important to me that others see me as an honest, law-abiding citizen’ (Bradford et al. 2015, p. 181).

3 The authors use the following items for measuring superordinate identification (called in this paper ‘citizen identity’): ‘Do you see yourself first and mainly as a member of the Australian community?’, ‘Is it important to you to be seen by others as a member of the Australian community?’, ‘Do you see yourself as an honest, law-abiding citizen?’, and ‘Is it important to you to be seen by others as an honest, law-abiding citizen?’; for the measurement of ethnic identity the authors use the following two items: ‘Do you see yourself first and mainly as a member of your racial/ethnic group?’, ‘Is it important that you are seen by others as a member of your racial/ethnic group?’ (Bradford et al. 2014, p. 549).

4 Note that this hypothesis contradicts what would be expected from the results of Farren and Hough (2018) described previously, i.e. that first generation visual migrants tend to evaluate the police better than second or higher generation visual migrants.

5 Migrants are those respondents with at least one parent being born outside the host country. Amongst native-born, all those who can be identified as belonging to a minority group, i.e. migrants from the third and higher generation, are dropped. For this a direct question included in some countries (the self-ascribed ethnicity question, see Farren and Hough 2018 for a detailed explanation) and the question about the language being spoken at home (if the first language being spoken at home is not the local language, the case is dropped) are used.

6 Note that Hough (2021, p. 19) in a later assessment of PJ theory argues for legality being a precondition of legitimacy and, as such, a dimension of procedural justice and not of legitimacy.

7 Full details (i.e. distributions and correlations) of control variables are available on request.

8 The offences are: graffiti; vandalism; shoplifting; burglary; stealing a bike; stealing a car; stealing from a car; robbery; theft; carrying a weapon; group fight; assault; selling drugs. For the exact questions see ISRD3 Working Group 2013, p. 12–13.

9 As a robustness check, all main analyses were also run dropping all respondents that have reported crimes during the last year and no major differences were found (analyses not included but available at request).

10 As a robustness check, similar models were estimated with non-linear regressions for compliance. The results are qualitatively the same as the ones presented in this paper. These results are not included but available at request.

11 Note that as described in the introduction, Bottoms recognizes three mechanisms of normative compliance, namely belief in the rules itself, attachment to significant others who validate the rules, and attachment to those who dictate the rules (Bottoms 2002, p. 89–98). The last one is the legitimacy mechanism and is at the centre of our analyses and what is expected to be reflected through indirect differences in compliance. The other two normative mechanisms may also influence compliance independently of the evaluations that respondents make of the police. This implies that, strictly speaking, the direct effects on compliance subsume both habitual mechanisms and these two other normative mechanisms. Still, for simplicity we stick to the interpretation that indirect effects reflect differences in normative compliance and that direct effects reflect differences in habitual compliance. Clearly this issue requires fuller exploration, which is beyond the scope of this study.

Additional information

Funding

The author was funded in part by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG): EN 490/1-1. For full details of ISRD3 funding, see Enzmann et al., 2018: ix.