Book Review: Mirage of police reform: Procedural justice and police legitimacy

• Author: David P. Weiss
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016817748722
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Worden, R. E., & McLean, S. J. (2017).

Mirage of police reform: Procedural justice and police legitimacy. Oakland: University of California Press. 254 pp.

$34.95, ISBN 978-0-520-29241-3.

Reviewed by: David P. Weiss, Fitchburg State University, MA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016817748722

Mirage of Police Reform, by Worden and McLean, is a fresh and timely look at procedural justice,

police legitimacy, and community trust. While Yale law professors Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares

may have seemingly cornered the scholastic market on police trust, legitimacy, and procedural

justice, Worden, associate profe ssor of criminal justice SUNY Albany, a nd McLean, associate

director of the John F. Finn Institute f or Public Safety, conduct a revised assessment of these

concepts—posing new questions—with the use of both qualitative and quantitative analysis and

through the lens of two case study police departments: Schenectady and Syracuse, NY.

Reminding readers of the seriousness of their book’s concepts, the authors provide a brief

historical context by reaching back to the riots of the ’60s and the Kerner Commission, mentioning

the Rodney King riots and the Warren Commission of the early ’90s, and, of course, highlighting this

century’s more recent community and policing crises across the country and the resultant 2015

President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. And, with an uptick in violent crime in several of

the United States larger cities since 2014, the authors’ focus on police and community could not be

more opportune.

Laid out in 10 manageable chapters, Worden and McLean explore legitimacy and police depart-

ments via institutional theory (i.e., police departments are institutional organizations which impact

bureaucratic change and the resultant outcomes from said change); citizens’ subjective experiences

of police action and procedural justice via survey data; police officers’ demonstrations of procedural

justice or injustice as recorded by independent observers; perceptions of police management

accountability as identified through semistructured interviews of both patrol officers and super-

visors; street-level bureaucrats and their ability to make sense of newly imposed organizational

reforms by command staff, such as efforts to make police more customer-service oriented; and

explore where all their data lead for possible future police reforms.

The authors straightforwardly hypothesize that a procedural justice model of policing is “likely to

be weakly implemented in police organizations ...and also that improvements in the procedural

justice with which police act in their interactions with citizens are unlikely to yield corresponding

improvements in citizens’ subjective experiences with police” (p. 5). Yet, this runs counter to much

of the previous scholarship on procedural justice. To test their hypotheses, the authors build a scale

of both procedural justice and injustice, noting the four domains of procedural justice as: voice,

where customers get to tell their side of the story; quality of interpersonal treatment, where cus-

tomers are treated with dignity and respect; trustworthy motives, where police care about the

Criminal Justice Review

2020, Vol. 45(1) 143-149

ª2017 Georgia State University

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