Making Every Police–Citizen Interaction Count

• Author: Lorraine Mazerolle,William Terrill
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12340
• Date: 01 February 2018
• Published date: 01 February 2018

POLICY ESSAY

CAN YOU BUILD A BETTER COP?

Making Every Police–Citizen Interaction

Count

The Challenges of Building a Better Cop

Lorraine Mazerolle

The University of Queensland

William Terrill

Arizona State University

Procedural justice policing is considered to be central to better policing (President’s

TaskForce on 21st Century Policing, 2015). Toimplement procedural justice polic-

ing, police need to understand and build four key principles into their interactions

with members of the public: (1) treating people with respect, (2) being neutral in their

decision making, (3) conveying trustworthy motives, and (4) giving citizens a voice during

the encounter. Drawing on these principles in a genuine manner underpins the quality of

the dialogic interaction (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). It is not just enough to say polite

things; the manner in which polite phrases and directives are communicated in both short

and long encounters makes the difference between people believing the procedures used by

police to reach an outcome are fair or not (Tyler, 2006 [1990]; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller,

2014).

Emily Owens, David Weisburd, Karen Amendola, and Geoffrey Alpert (2018, this

issue) use a randomized field trial in Seattle to explore whether training and supervision

can “build a better cop.” In this case, better cops are those who consciously slow down

their thought processes to use the principles of procedural justice during different types of

everyday (short and long) citizen encounters. This trial is one in a series of randomized

controlled field trials (RCTs) in policing that has evaluated whether police can be trained

to use procedural justice in their everyday encounters (e.g., Bates, Antrobus, Bennett,

and Martin, 2015; Lowrey, Maguire, and Bennett, 2016; MacQueen and Bradford, 2015;

Mazerolle, Bennett, Antrobus, and Eggins, 2012; Sahin, Braga, Apel, and Brunson, 2016;

Direct correspondence to Lorraine Mazerolle, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Michie

Building (9), Room 440, St Lucia Q 4072 Australia (e-mail: l.mazerolle@uq.edu.au).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12340 C2018 American Society of Criminology 89

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 17 rIssue 1