Perceived police legitimacy: investigating its association with college-based informal social controls

ABSTRACT

Research has found that when private citizens view law enforcement as legitimate authority figures, they are more likely to obey laws and voluntarily comply with police demands. Although procedural justice has shown to be an important predictor of perceived police legitimacy, a recent line of studies has found other significant correlates of this outcome, including media exposure, ethnic identity and strain. To date, however, few studies have explored the role collegiate-based informal social controls play in predicting law enforcement legitimacy evaluations. Using questionnaire data from a convenience sample of college students, linear regression equations were estimated to explore whether Hirschi's four social bond measures predict the obligation to obey and trust in police constructs of police legitimacy. Across both models and even after controlling for procedural justice, respondent beliefs were positively correlated with these measures. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Procedural justice
• police legitimacy
• obligation to obey
• trust in police
• social bond
• informal social control

Notes

1. While Bradford, Murphy and Jackson (2014) criticized some of these police legitimacy items for failing to capture the full extent of this concept and for failing to display adequate discriminant validity with procedural justice items, other past police legitimacy researchers such as Tyler (2003), Sunshine and Tyler (2003), Reisig et al. (2007) and even Reisig, Tankebe, and Mesko (2012) each found police legitimacy to be a two-dimensional construct represented adequately by the measures adopted in this study. Factor analytic results displayed in the appendix provide further supportive evidence of this conclusion.

2. Although some have argued that outcome variables used in OLS regression models should be composed of at least five items (Hair et al., 2010), several researchers within the social science discipline, and police legitimacy field more specifically, have subjected three or four-item criterion measures to linear regression analyses (Ferdik, 2014; Ferdik et al., 2014; Wolfe, 2011).