Justifying violence: legitimacy, ideology and public support for police use of force

ABSTRACT

Under what conditions do people support police use of force? In this paper we assess some of the empirical links between police legitimacy, political ideology (right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), and support for ‘reasonable’ use of force (e.g. an officer striking a citizen in self-defence) and ‘excessive’ use of force (e.g. an officer using violence to arrest an unarmed person who is not offering violent resistance). Analysing data from an online survey with US participants (n = 186) we find that legitimacy is a positive predictor of reasonable but not excessive police use of force, and that political ideology predicts support for excessive but not reasonable use of force. We conclude with the idea that legitimacy places normative constraints around police power. On the one hand, legitimacy is associated with increased support for the use of force, but only when violence is bounded within certain acceptable limits. On the other hand, excessive use of force seems to require an extra-legal justification that is – at least in our analysis – partly ideological. Our findings open up a new direction of research in what is currently a rather sparse psychological literature on the ability of legitimacy to ‘tame’ coercive power.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes towards police use of force
• legitimacy
• right-wing authoritarianism
• social dominance orientation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Respondents were asked whether they approve or disapprove (binary response) of police use of force in four different situations. Researchers typically treat two of these situations (striking an adult who was attempting to escape from custody and striking an adult who was attacking the policeman with his fists) as instances of reasonable use of force, while the two other situations (striking an adult who has said vulgar and obscene things and striking an adult who was being questioned as a suspect in a murder case) are usually considered examples of excessive use of force.

2. It is also plausible that people are imagining the excessive force being directed towards certain out-groups, the ‘other’ here may be the ‘non-law abiding citizen’ or ‘offender’ who may often be imagined to be ethnic and other minority groups, particular in contexts where ethnocentrism is strong and the police represent the dominant majority group (cf. Bradford et al., 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CONICYT/FONDAP/Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES), under [grant no. 15130009] and by CONICYT/FONDECYT Postdoctorado under [grant no. 3140419].