Officers as Mirrors
2014/05/08 by Ben Bradford, Kristina Murphy, Jonathan Jackson · 300 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Context (archaeology) #Crime Patterns and Interventions #Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis #Criminal justice #Criminology #Economic Justice #Identity (music) #Law #Legitimacy #Perception #Policing Practices and Perceptions #Political science #Politics #Procedural justice #Psychology #Social group #Social identity theory #Social psychology #Sociology #Superordinate goals
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/bjc/azu021
published in The British Journal of Criminology 54(4), 527-550 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2014/05/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02
Abstract
Encounters with the criminal justice system shape people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of legal authorities, and the dominant explanatory framework for this relationship revolves around the idea that procedurally just practice increases people’s positive connections to justice institutions. But there have been few assessments of the idea—central to procedural justice theory—that social identity acts as an important social-psychological bridge in this process. Our contribution in this paper is to examine the empirical links between procedural justice, social identity and legitimacy in the context of policing in Australia. A representative two-wave panel survey of Australians suggests that social identity does mediate the association between procedural justice and perceptions of legitimacy. It seems that when people feel fairly treated by police, their sense of identification with the superordinate group the police represent is enhanced, strengthening police legitimacy as a result. By contrast, unfair treatment signals to people that they do not belong, undermining both identification and police legitimacy.
Citations
Cited by
- Building Immigrants’ Solidarity with Police: Procedural Justice, Identity and Immigrants’ Willingness to Cooperate with Police
- Policing and Sense of Place: ‘Shallow’ and ‘Deep’ Security in an English Town
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- Evaluating the causal mechanisms from procedural justice to police legitimacy and compliance in the United States: An in‐depth mixed‐methods approach
- Reassessing the relationship between procedural justice and police legitimacy.
- More than Money: The Political Consequences of Reparations
- Fairness, function, and belonging: what shapes police legitimacy in Aotearoa New Zealand?
- Procedural justice as a reward to the compliant: an ethnography of police–citizen interaction in police custody
- Why do people cooperate with the police and criminal courts? A test of procedural justice theory in 30 countries
- A Sense of Injustice Loosens the Moral Bind of Law
- The Importance of Being Satisfied
- Beyond group engagement: Multiple pathways from encounters with the police to cooperation and compliance in Northern Ireland. [europepmc]
- On order and disorder during the COVID-19 pandemic. [europepmc]
- Using Structural Equations to Model the Relationships between Procedural Justice, Risky Lifestyles, and Violent Inmate Misconduct. [europepmc]
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- The general intervention model of policing: a narrative review of the literature. [europepmc]
- Crime Reporting and Institutional Reputation of the Police in Mexico [europepmc]
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