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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Description
Recently, there has been an upsurge in highly publicized negative police-citizen encounters, contributing to the current crisis in police legitimacy. These encounters, mostly filmed and disseminated by citizens, provide a new type of vicarious experience through which the viewer can assess police-citizen interactions, potentially shaping their perceptions of the police. These recordings have sparked national conversations and protests regarding police behavior and treatment of minority citizens. An area that has received less attention, however, is what effect viewing video recordings of less contentious police-citizen interactions has on public perceptions of police. To that end, this study seeks to address the knowledge gap through experimental methodology. Using actual footage of a variety of police-citizen encounters, this study examines the impact of viewing videos of police encounters on individuals' perceptions of police legitimacy, procedural justice, estimates of police misconduct, and their willingness to cooperate with police. Also examined are the impact these videos have on support for officer body-worn cameras and willingness to film the police. The findings indicate the impact of viewing police-citizen encounters on individual perceptions and attitudes are primarily linked to the content – whether positive, negative or neutral – of the video. Specifically, positive videos depicting procedurally just encounters increased perceptions of procedural justice, decreased estimations of police misconduct and increased support for officer body-worn cameras. Viewing negative videos, however, decreased perceptions of police legitimacy, distributive fairness, and procedural justice while increasing estimations of police misconduct and willingness to film the police in the future. The effects of the video encounters on perceptions of police were not lasting and were not stable when respondents were surveyed again two weeks later. Lasting effects were found for individuals’ self-reported willingness to film the police in the future. Given these findings, the process-based model of policing should consider also incorporating digital vicarious experiences when examining factors impacting perceptions of police.
ContributorsParry, Megan Marie (Author) / Wallace, Danielle M (Thesis advisor) / White, Michael D. (Committee member) / Katz, Charles (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Legal socialization examines how people acquire their views about the law. A key tenet within this field is that fair interactions with nonlegal authorities, such as teachers, influence people’s legal values (i.e., the ubiquity hypothesis) which subsequently influences how people judge legal authority later in life. This study uses data from the New Hampshire Youth Survey to test the ubiquity hypothesis. Participants completed measures of how procedurally just their teachers were in general, as well as the procedural justice of their least and favorite teachers. Approximately 45 days later, they participated in an experiment where they read a vignette describing an interaction between a police officer and a young adult. Participants read vignettes where the officer either did or did not give a voice to the young adult and did or did not behave in a neutral manner. After reading the vignette, participants were asked to judge the procedural justice and legitimacy of the officer. The results indicated students’ judgments of the officer’s procedural justice were not influenced by prior experiences with teacher procedural justice. Judgments of officer legitimacy, on the other hand, were associated with teacher procedural justice, specifically participant’s least favorite teacher. These results indicate a more nuanced view of the ubiquity hypothesis than has been portrayed by legal socialization scholars whereby prior experiences with nonlegal authority affect some legal judgments but not others.
ContributorsPerea, Angel Luis (Author) / Trinkner, Rick (Thesis director) / Fine, Adam (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
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.
ContributorsHutchings, Gail (Author) / Trinkner, Rick (Thesis director) / Fine, Adam (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor)
Created2022-12
Description
The research problem in this project is how are police officer routines influenced by training on procedural justice and building legitimacy? This thesis analyzes the differences in activities of trained vs. non-trained officers and makes conclusions about the utility of such training methods. Written activity logs used by police officers during a hot spots policing project were transferred to a database and coded for the types of activities officers were taking part in. The data revealed that police officers trained in legitimacy and procedural justice emphasize different principles in their activities from untrained officers, and even within the trained group there were differences observed. Based off these findings, recommendations for moving forward with this training include emphasizing the principles the department would like to see them enforce and making clearer objectives part of the training.
ContributorsHernandez-Garcia, Abiud (Author) / Telep, Cody (Thesis director) / Terrill, William (Committee member) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05