Reassessing the Nature of Fairness Judgments of Police Officers: The Importance of Autonomy and Bounded Authority

This thesis expands on Procedural Justice Theory (PJT), which argues that all else equal, judgments of fairness are most strongly motivated by process and relational factors of an interaction. This includes neutral, consistent, and transparent decision-making as well as respectful and dignified interpersonal treatment. The bounded authority perspective argues that judgments of fairness are also influenced by evaluations of police respecting the boundaries of their authority and not overstepping into domains under personal jurisdiction. This study tests this argument using an online convenience sample (n =1048) recruited from Prolific Academic. Respondents completed surveys at three time points between April and June of 2020 that included measures of procedural justice, distributive justice, bounded authority, and overall fairness judgments of the police. Across all three waves, results showed that procedural justice, distributive justice, and bounded authority had strong positive associations with police fairness. Procedural justice had a significantly stronger association than either distributive justice or bounded authority, while the latter factors were not significantly different. I discuss the implications for our criminal justice and directions for future research as well the need for a representative sample and use of experimental design to clarify the impact of bounded authority concerns.