Jonathan Jackson

The enormous financial cost of criminal justice has motivated increased scrutiny and recognition of the need for constructive change, but what of the ethical costs of current practices and policies? Moreover, if we seriously value the principles of liberal democracy then there is no question that the ethics of criminal justice are everybody's business, concerns for the entire society. The Routledge Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics brings together international scholars to explore the most signiicant ethical issues throughout their many areas of expertise, anchoring their discussions in the empirical realities of the issues faced rather than applying moral theory at a distance. Contributions from philosophers, legal scholars, criminologists and psychologists bring a fresh and interdisciplinary approach to the eld. The Handbook is divided into three parts: Part I addresses the core issues concerning criminal sanction, the moral and political aspects of the justiication of punishment, and the relationship between law and morality. Part II examines criminalization and criminal liability, and the assumptions and attitudes shaping those aspects of contemporary criminal justice. Part III evaluates current policies and practices of criminal procedure, exploring the roles of police, prosecutors, judges, and juries and suggesting directions for revising how criminal justice is achieved. Throughout, scholars seek pathways for change and suggest new solutions to address the central concerns of criminal justice ethics. This book is an ideal resource for upper-undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in criminal justice ethics, criminology, and criminal justice theory, and also for students of philosophy interested in punishment, law and society, and law and ethics.

What does it mean to trust the police? What makes the police legitimate in the eyes of the policed? What builds trust, legitimacy and cooperation, and what undermines the bond between police and the public? These questions are central to current debates concerning the relationship between the British police and the public it serves. Yet, in the context of British policing they are seldom asked explicitly, still less examined in depth. Drawing on psychological and sociological explanatory paradigms, Just Authority presents a cutting-edge empirical study into public trust, police legitimacy, and people’s readiness to cooperate with officers. It represents, first, the most detailed test to date of Tom Tyler’s procedural justice model attempted outside the United States. Second, it uncovers the social ecology of trust and legitimacy. Third, it describes the relationships between trust, legitimacy and cooperation.

This book contains many important lessons for practitioners, policy-makers and academics. As elsewhere the dominant vision of policing in Great Britain continues to stress instrumental effectiveness: the ‘fight against crime’ will be won by pro-active and even aggressive policing. In line with work from the United States and elsewhere, Just Authority casts significant doubt on such claims. When people find policing to be unfair, disrespectful and careless of human dignity, not only is trust lost, legitimacy is also damaged and cooperation is withdrawn as a result. Absent such public support, the job of the police is made harder and the avowed objectives of less crime and disorder placed ever further from reach.

While scholarly attention to date has focused almost entirely on individual-level drivers of vaccine confidence, we show that macro-level factors play an important role in understanding individual propensity to be confident about vaccination. We analyse data from the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor survey covering over 120,000 respondents in 126 countries to assess how societal-level trust in science is related to vaccine confidence. In countries with a high aggregate level of trust in science, people are more likely to be confident about vaccination, over and above their individual-level scientific trust. Additionally, we show that societal consensus around trust in science moderates these individual-level and country-level relationships. In countries with a high level of consensus regarding the trustworthiness of science and scientists, the positive correlation between trust in science and vaccine confidence is stronger than it is in comparable countries where the level of social consensus is weaker.

We review the concepts of legitimacy, trust, and legal cynicism in the context of the debate about police legitimacy, discuss the extent to which these concepts relate to each other, and offer some early, speculative thoughts on how a relational model of legitimacy can extend beyond procedural justice concerns. Relying upon procedural justice theory, we emphasise the distinction between police legitimacy and legitimation: popular legitimacy is defined as public beliefs that legal authority has the right to rule (people acknowledge the moral appropriateness of legal authority) and the authority to govern (people recognise legal authority as the rightful authority), whereas legitimation is related to the criteria people use to judge the normative appropriateness of legal agents’ exercise of power (e.g., the extent to which police officers are trustworthy to behave in accordance with people’s normative expectations). Building on studies on legal cynicism and legal socialisation, we consider how other aspects of police conduct can send negative relational messages about people’s value within society and undermine their judgements about the legitimacy of legal authority – messages of oppression, marginalisation, and neglect over the life course. We conclude suggesting avenues for future research on public-police relations.

Objective:We conducted an exploratory study testing procedural justice theory with a novel population. Weassessed the extent to which police procedural justice, effectiveness, legitimacy, and perceived risk ofsanction predict compliance with the law among people experiencing homelessness.Hypotheses:We didnot develop formal a priori hypotheses but examinedfive general research questions. First, are there positiveassociations between police procedural justice, police legitimacy, and compliance? Second, do proceduraljustice and legitimacy differentially predict compliance, depending on the particular type of offending?Third, are there positive associations between police effectiveness, perceived risk of sanction, andcompliance? Fourth, does the perceived risk of sanction differentially predict compliance, dependingon the particular type of offending? Andfifth, are there positive associations between moral judgmentsabout different offending behaviors and compliance?Method:Two hundred people (87% male, 49% aged45–64, 37% White British) experiencing homelessness on the streets of an inner London borough completeda survey that included measures of procedural justice, police legitimacy, perceived risk of sanction,morality, and compliance with the law.Results:Procedural justice and police legitimacy were only weakly(and not significantly) associated with any of the three types of compliance (compliance with lawsprohibiting low-level crimes, behaviors specific to the street population, and high-level crimes). Policeeffectiveness positively predicted compliance via perceived risk of sanction, but only for street-population-specific offenses that can be important for survival on the streets, such as begging and sleeping in certainlocalities. Morality was positively associated with all three types of compliance behaviors. Supplementaryanalyses suggested a small amount of instability in the results, however, possibly because of the relativelysmall sample size.Conclusions:The lack of relevant relational connections to legal authority may explainwhy procedural fairness and perceptions of police legitimacy were not particularly important predictors ofcompliance in this context. More research is needed into the types of marginalized communities for whomstructural factors of alienation and lack of access to resources may serve to reduce normative groupconnections. Future work should test whether the need to survive on the streets leads people to discountsome social and relational constraints to behavior, making people (almost by definition) more instrumentalin relation to law and law enforcement.

How do social norms and legal requirements combine to shape collective behaviour? A multi-wave ten-city panel study set during the first UK lockdown finds that compliance was a powerful in-group signalling device, driven by the expressive and coordinating power of formal and informal rules. COVID-19 pandemic laws allowed the Government to operate as an expressive agent, telling people what needed to be done and why. Acting upon mutual expectations for the common good then helped people to coordinate against the virus with a sense of a shared fate and identity. Widespread collective compliance allowed the police to continue to privilege engagement, explanation and encouragement over heavy-handed enforcement tactics that damage their popular legitimacy.

Social identity is a core aspect of procedural justice theory, which predicts that fair treatment at the hands of power holders such as police expresses, communicates, and generates feelings of inclusion, status, and belonging within salient social categories. In turn, a sense of shared group membership with power holders, with police officers as powerful symbolic representatives of "law-abiding society," engenders trust, legitimacy, and cooperation. Yet, this aspect of the theory is rarely explicitly considered in empirical research. Moreover, the theory rests on the underexamined assumption that the police represent one fixed and stable superordinate group, including the often-marginalized people with whom they interact, and that it is only superordinate identification that is important to legitimacy and cooperation. In this article, we present results from two U.K.-based studies that explore the identity dynamics of procedural justice theory. We reason that the police not only represent the "law-abiding, national citizen" superordinate group but also are a symbol of order/conflict and a range of connected social categories that can generate relational identification. First, we used a general-population sample and found that relational identification with police and identification as a law-abiding citizen mediated some of the association between procedural justice and legitimacy and were both stronger predictors of cooperation than legitimacy. Second, a sample of people living on the streets of London was used to explore these same relationships among a highly marginalized group for whom the police might represent a salient outgroup. We found that relational and superordinate identification were both strong positive predictors of cooperation, whereas legitimacy was not. These results have important implications for our understanding of both police legitimacy and public cooperation, as well as the extent to which police activity can serve to include-or exclude-members of the public.

Compliance with lockdown restrictions (e.g. social distancing) is important if the Covid-19 pandemic is to be brought under control. In a liberal democratic state, the bulk of such compliance has to be voluntary and consensual. Thus far, this seems to have been the case in the UK, with police intervention rarely necessary. However, police are needed in a minority of cases, and lockdown fatigue and the easing of restrictions over the coming weeks and months may pose significant challenges to police organisations tasked with both enforcement and maintaining widespread voluntary compliance. What we know about policing and compliance, and how we know it People have many reasons for complying with laws and regulations, but the most commonly cited are: • Moral judgements, e.g. believing a behaviour proscribed by law is wrong • Group solidarity and a desire to uphold social norms • The legitimacy of the rule-maker/enforcer-a moral duty to obey the law and police • Habit-we do what we are used to do • Deterrence-fear of the legal consequences if one were to break the law • Self-protection/self-interest Academic research over several decades has found support for most of the above, although there are important caveats. Notably, deterrence-related factors (fear and severity of punishment) have been shown to be only weakly correlated with compliance in many situations. The risk of getting caught can be important in some circumstances, for some people, at some times. The severity of sanction appears almost irrelevant-increasing fines and prison-terms appears to have very little effect on behaviour. Morality, social bonds, legitimacy and habit are far stronger predictors of compliance behaviours. Research on what police can do to motivate compliance with the law has similarly tended to conclude that presenting a credible deterrent threat has only a weak and inconsistent effect. While some forms of activity, e.g. hotspots policing, do appear to motivate compliance among target populations-and presumably do so via some sort of deterrent effect-evidence for a positive effect on crime in most other areas is thin. Indeed, invasive police powers such as stop and search have proven to be largely ineffective, with significant negative collateral consequences including reduced trust and engagement. Instead, a consistent and growing body of work suggests that police activity experienced as procedurally just (respectful, open and accountable, explaining decisions and listening to people, making unbiased decisions, and conveying trustworthy motives) can motivate compliance, and does so in a way that is more sustainable and durable than the presentation of deterrent threat. Procedural justice enhances the legitimacy of the police and the wider justice system and, relatedly, strengthens the social bonds between individuals, justice actors and the wider social groups within which both are embedded. Both legitimacy and social bonds shape, in turn, compliance with police directives and the law. What we think is happening in the covid-19 pandemic In the first weeks of the lockdown the restrictions put in place to combat Covid-19 seem to command widespread and committed support. High levels of compliance appear to be driven primarily by a sense that (a) it is right to comply with the restrictions to 'save lives and protect the NHS', (b) it is normative to do so (i.e. other people are complying and would expect the same of you), and (c) it is a legal requirement (invoking the law reinforces the collective need to take distancing seriously). The police have also benefitted from increased public support for frontline staff and 'key workers'. Naturally, instrumental concerns, especially fear of infection may also play a role, although there is limited evidence of this.

Objectives: To test whether normative and non-normative forms of obligation to obey the police are empirically distinct and to assess whether they exhibit different dynamics in terms of the downstream effects of police-citizen contact. To draw an empirically informed conclusion as to whether police legitimacy can be partly defined as a normatively grounded form of obligation to obey the police. Methods: The Scottish Community Engagement Trial of procedurally just policing had a putative but unexpectedly negative causal effect. To help extract value from the study we use a natural effect model for causally ordered mediators to assess causal pathways that include-but also extend beyond-the experimental treatment to procedural justice. Results: Confirmatory factor analysis indicates that normative and non-normative forms of obligation are empirically distinct. Causal mediation analysis suggests that normative obligation to obey the police is sensitive to subjectively experienced procedurally just or unjust police behaviour and influences cooperation with the police and traffic law compliance in a way that is consistent with procedural justice theory (PJT). Non-normative obligation to obey the police is 'sticky' and unresponsive: it does not transmit the impact of the contact on either cooperation or compliance with traffic laws, and it is weakly and negatively correlated with normative obligation to obey the police (despite having moderately strong negative correlations with procedural justice and personal sense of power). Conclusions: Scholars have argued that criminologists have conflated normative and non-normative forms of felt obligation to obey police commands and that obligation should consequently be treated as an outcome of legitimacy rather than a constituent part of legitimacy. Findings indicate that legitimacy can reasonably be defined partly as normative obligation in the Scottish road-user context, so long as it is measured properly. More research into the dynamics of non-normative obligation to obey the police is needed.

This chapter begins with an empirical analysis of attitudes towards the law, which, in turn, inspires a philosophical re-examination of the moral status of the rule of law. In Section 2, we empirically analyse nationally representative survey data from the US about law-related attitudes and legal compliance. Although the survey, and the completion of our study, preceded the recent anti-police brutality mass protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, the relevance of our observations extends to this recent development and its likely reverberations in terms of police legitimacy. Consistently with prior studies, we find that people’s ascriptions of legitimacy to the legal system (labelled here ‘legitimacy’) are predicted strongly by their perceptions of the procedural justice and lawfulness of police and court officials’ action. Two factors emerge as significant predictors of people’s compliance with the law: (i) their belief that they have a (content-independent, moral) duty to obey the law (which is one element of legitimacy, as defined here); and (ii) their moral assessment of the content of specific legal requirements (referred to here as ‘perceived moral content of laws’). We also observe an interactive relationship between these two factors. At higher levels of perceived moral content of laws, felt duty to obey is a better predictor of compliance than it is at lower levels. And, similarly, perceived moral content of laws is a better predictor of compliance at higher levels of felt duty to obey. This suggests that the moral content incorporated in specific laws interacts with the normative force people ascribe to legal authorities by virtue of other qualities, specifically here procedural justice and lawfulness. In Section 3, the focus shifts to a philosophical analysis, whereby we identify a parallel (similarly interactive) modality in the way that form and content mutually affect the value of the rule of law. We advocate a distinctive alternative to two rival approaches in jurisprudential discourse, the first of which claims that Lon Fuller’s eight precepts of legality embody moral qualities not contingent on the law’s content, while the second denies any independent moral value in these eight precepts, viewing them as entirely subservient to the law’s substantive goals. In contrast, on the view put forward here, Fuller’s principles possess (inter alia) an expressive moral quality, but their expressive effect does not materialise in isolation from other, contextual factors. In particular, the extent to which it materialises is partly sensitive to the moral quality of law’s content.

We consider three new directions of research into police-citizen authority relations: (a) the subjectivity of fairness perception, (b) the mechanisms linking procedural justice to legitimacy, and (c) statistical methods to estimate causal mechanisms. First, police fairness may be a subjective experience and perception motivated by a range of individual and environmental factors: we outline a motivation cognition framework of fairness perception (Barclay et al., 2017) that revolves around people 'reading' the dynamics of an encounter with the police in a way that is shaped by instrumental, relational and moral motives, with directional and non-directional goals. Second, the causal effect of procedural justice on legitimacy may partly be transmitted by social identity and personal sense of power and autonomy. Third, causal mediation analysis is complex and we show how to decompose the average treatment effect in a way that allows for the estimation of causally mediating and moderating effects, provided that certain causal identifying assumptions are satisfied (VanderWeele, 2014).

This article reviews the international evidence on the potential nature, sources, and consequences of police and legal legitimacy. In brief, I find that procedural justice is the strongest predictor of police legitimacy in most of the countries under investigation, although normative judgements about fair process may—in some contexts—be crowded out by public concerns about police effectiveness and corruption, the scale of the crime problem, and the association of the police with a historically oppressive and underperforming state. Legitimacy tends to be linked to people’s willingness to cooperate with the police, with only a small number of national exceptions. There is also a fair amount of evidence that people who say they feel a moral duty to obey the law tend also to report complying with the law in the past or intending to comply with the law in the future. The main argument is, however, that international enthusiasm for testing procedural justice theory is outpacing methodological rigor and theoretical clarity. On the one hand, the lack of attention to methodological equivalence is holding back the development of a properly comparative cross-national analysis. On the other hand, the literature would benefit from (a) greater delineation between legitimation (the bases on which citizens judge the rightfulness of an institution) and legitimacy (the acceptance or rejection of the rightfulness of an institution and the normatively grounded duty to obey), (b) stronger differentiation between police and legal legitimacy, and (c) more attention given to isolating the mechanisms through which rightfulness and consent motivate cooperation and compliance.

In a fascinating paper on the nature of police legitimacy in Southern China, Sun et al. (2018) present evidence that what have previously been treated as possible sources of legitimacy—public perceptions of police procedural justice, distributive justice, effectiveness and lawfulness—are in fact constituent components of legitimacy. We argue in this paper, that the empirical strategy used to reach this conclusion is not fit for purpose because both conceptual stances—possible sources of legitimacy or constituent components of legitimacy—are consistent with the same fitted statistical model. Ironically, therefore, Sun and colleagues end up assuming rather than discovering the normative bases on which people judge police legitimacy. To be sensitive to cultural context means using a methodology that does not a priori impose the preconditions of legitimacy. We illustrate this general point by analysing nationally representative data from 30 countries across Europe and beyond.

Understanding community perceptions of crime and safety is important to policy makers, legislators, and subsequently communities themselves. However, such community perceptions are complex and have generally been poorly researched and assessed in the Australian context. This project had two components. A state-wide sample of communities in Victoria, and a smaller scale component of the project in Liverpool City, NSW. This report focuses on the Liverpool NSW component of the project. The Liverpool (NSW) component of the project was undertaken with a randomised and stratified survey sample of n=320 and 5 focus groups of n=24. These focus groups were selected largely from harder to reach groups less likely to be well represented in the survey, but more likely to express concerns about crime. While the project was interested in overall levels, frequency and intensity of people’s worry about crime, we also sought to understand how people respond to their fears, and what impact these responses had on their lives. We also mapped out a range of risk and protective factors likely to impact negatively and positively on people’s worries. This mixed methods approach gives us unique insights into the concerns people have about crime, the actions they take based on these concerns, and the way in which they discuss and describe their worries.

Given that there is currently no common approach used across Canada to measure public attitudes towards the police, the objective of this study was to develop an empirically-informed small subset of items that can be used by Canadian police services for this purpose. We recommend a standardized, comprehensive and validated set of 12 ‘core’ survey items to measure public attitudes towards the police. Police services across Canada can use them to capture public opinion in a way that is comparable between jurisdictions and track change over time. We also recommend a supplementary set of measures of socio-demographics, police-citizen contact, victimization experience, perceived safety and perceived disorder.

The association between trust in the police and neighbourhood context is well known. Police seem to enjoy more trust when community settings are perceived as orderly, cohesive and well-functioning, and trust seems to be lower when order and cohesion seem attenuated or under threat. Yet, little attention has been paid to the association between neighbourhood diversity and trust in the police. Allport's contact hypothesis suggests that because diversity increases intergroup contact and thus a sense of cohesion, it may promote trust in the police. We use data from a nationally representative survey conducted in 2014, combined with Census and other local-area data, to explore the association between ethno-religious diversity and trust in the Police Service of Northern Ireland. We find that trust is higher in more diverse areas, primarily because Catholics living in such areas report significantly higher levels of trust than their counterparts living in less diverse areas. We interpret these results in light of what policing means in contemporary Northern Ireland, almost two-decades after the country's landmark reform of policing began.

Procedural justice is receiving increasing global attention both as a way of improving the legitimacy of policing and because styles of policing associated with procedural justice seem to be associated with improvements in community-police relations and reductions in crime. This chapter locates procedural justice theory within a broader framework of compliance theories, and summarises the main features of the theory. The authors have developed, refined and tested procedural justice theory in Europe and elsewhere, using the 2010 European Social Survey, and the chapter presents some key findings. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the practical and ethical issues in embedding principles of procedural justice in policing.

The item count method is a way of asking sensitive survey questions which protects the anonymity of the respondents by randomization before the interview. It can be used to estimate the probability of sensitive behaviour and to model how it depends on explanatory variables. We analyse item count survey data on the illegal behaviour of buying stolen goods. The analysis of an item count question is best formulated as an instance of modelling incomplete categorical data. We propose an efficient implementation of the estimation which also provides explicit variance estimates for the parameters. We then suggest specifications for the model for the control items, which is an auxiliary but unavoidable part of the analysis of item count data. These considerations and the results of our analysis of criminal behaviour highlight the fact that careful design of the questions is crucial for the success of the item count method.

In this chapter I consider two ways by which the legitimacy of legal authorities might motivate people to abide by the law. Following recent criminological research I define legitimacy along two different dimensions: the first is the public recognition of the rightful authority of an institution, and the second is a sense among citizens that the institution is just, moral and appropriate. Data from a randomized controlled trial of procedurally just policing provide further support for the idea that justice systems can secure compliance by (a) instilling in citizens a sense of deference and obligation, and (b) showing to citizens that they represent a requisite sense of moral appropriateness. While prior work has tended to focus on the idea that legitimacy shape compliance through felt obligation, the current analysis shows that compliance is predicted by both duty to obey and moral endorsement. Consistent with a good deal of existing evidence, the findings also indicate the importance of procedural justice and group identification in the production of institutional legitimacy. I conclude with the idea that legitimacy may be able to shape compliance through shape content-free obligation and shared moral appropriateness.

This paper examines the importance of neighbourhood context in explaining violence in London. Exploring in a new context Sampson’s work on the relationship between interdependent spatial patterns of concentrated disadvantage and crime, we assess whether collective efficacy (i.e. shared expectations about norms, values and goals, as well as the ability of members of the community to realise these goals) mediates any potential impact on violence of neighbourhood deprivation, residential stability and population heterogeneity. Reporting findings from a dataset based on face-to-face interviews of 60,000 individuals living in 4,700 London neighbourhoods, we find that collective efficacy is negatively related to police recorded violence. But unlike previous research, we find that collective efficacy does not mediate the statistical relationship between structural characteristics of the neighbourhood and violence. After finding that collective efficacy is unrelated to an alternative measure of neighbourhood violence, we discuss limitations and possible explanations for our results, before setting out plans for further research.

Applying in a new setting Robert Sampson’s (2012) work on interdependent spatial patterns, we link structural characteristics of the neighbourhood to public beliefs and worries about neighbourhood violence via two intermediate mechanisms: (a) collective efficacy and (b) neighbourhood disorder. Analysing data from face-to-face interviews of 61,436 individuals living in 4,761 London neighbourhoods, we find that the strength of informal social control mechanisms and the extent of low-level breaches of common standards of behaviour communicates information about the prevalence and threat of violent crime in one’s neighbourhood. Moreover, collective efficacy partially mediates many of the statistical effects of structural characteristics of the neighbourhood – such as concentrated disadvantage – on beliefs and worries about violent crime. Theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

As the currents of globalisation edge the number and proportion of immigrant groups in towns and cities throughout the world ever higher, the question of whether and how ethnic diversity affects the social cohesion of communities has become an increasingly prominent and contested topic of academic and political debate. The majority of extant empirical investigations of this question have considered the effect of diversity across a national distribution of neighbourhoods. In this paper we focus on a single city: London. As possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet, London serves as a particularly suitable test-bed for theories about the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on pro-social attitudes. Counter to the majority of existing studies, we find neighbourhood ethnic diversity in London to be positively related to the perceived social cohesion of neighbourhood residents, once the level of economic deprivation is accounted for. Ethnic segregation within neighbourhoods, on the other hand, is associated with lower levels of perceived social cohesion. Both effects are strongly moderated by the age of individual residents; diversity has a positive effect on social cohesion for young people but this effect dissipates in older age groups, the reverse pattern is found for ethnic segregation.

How People Judge Policing is an original and gripping book with a plethora of excellent examples showing how procedural justice is understood, voiced and evaluated by ordinary citizens and the police alike. It urges its readers to use novel methods both to generate new hypotheses and to answer existing research questions, which is why we recommend it as an exceptional read for criminologists, policymakers, and the police. This volume is a thought-provoking and memorable swansong for the primary author, whose contributions are already sorely missed from policing research.