Measuring, Managing, and Enhancing Procedural Justice in Policing: Promise and Pitfalls
| Author | Sarah J. McLean,Robert E. Worden |
| DOI | 10.1177/0887403416662505 |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
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Article
Criminal Justice Policy Review
2018, Vol. 29(2) 149 –171
Measuring, Managing,
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0887403416662505
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Justice in Policing: Promise
and Pitfalls
Robert E. Worden1,2 and Sarah J. McLean1
Abstract
The procedural justice that citizens subjectively experience with the police affects
police legitimacy. The procedural justice of policing is typically not measured in
police agencies, nor is it an outcome for which managers are held accountable. We
examine whether and how the measurement of procedural justice would affect
its management. Survey-based measures of subjective procedural justice in police
contacts were reported to two departments’ command staffs on a monthly basis in
Compstat meetings. The impacts of thusly measuring performance were estimated.
We also analyzed an indicator of procedural justice that was based on systematic
observation through video and audio recording of police-citizen encounters, and
we interviewed patrol officers and supervisors about supervisors’ efforts to manage
procedural justice. Neither indicator of police performance revealed consistent
changes. However, a modest improvement on one platoon was detected. We discuss
the implications for enhancing police legitimacy.
Keywords
police legitimacy, procedural justice, police management, Compstat
Introduction
When people have contacts with the police, the fairness with which police are per-
ceived to act affects citizens’ trust and confidence in the police and their sense that the
1John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, Inc., Albany, NY, USA
2University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Robert E. Worden, John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, 421 New Karner Road, Suite 12, Albany, NY
12205, USA.
Email: rworden@finninstitute.org
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Criminal Justice Policy Review 29(2)
police deserve to be obeyed—that is, the procedural justice that citizens subjectively
experience affects the “legitimacy” of the police. A large body of social psychological
research demonstrates the strength and consistency of these empirical relationships.
Translating this body of research into police practice is not straightforward, however.
With the voluminous research on procedural justice and legitimacy as a point of
departure, Schulhofer, Tyler, and Huq (2011) described a procedural justice model of
policing (also see Meares, 2009; Tyler, 2004). Part of such a model, we suppose, would
consist of measuring procedural justice, and making procedural justice an outcome for
which police managers are held accountable. Management accountability through
administrative mechanisms like the New York City Police Department’s “Compstat”
is rather widely prevalent, yet in Compstat, the measurement of outcomes is normally
confined to crime. The procedural justice of police-citizen interactions is one aspect of
policing that Compstat has neglected, as it is neither measured nor an outcome for
which police managers are held accountable.
The primary objective of this project was to learn whether and how the measurement
of procedural justice would lead to its better management. Information on the quality of
police-citizen encounters was drawn from surveys of citizens who had contact with the
police in each of two cities, Schenectady and Syracuse, New York. Following the accu-
mulation of baseline survey data, survey results on citizens’ satisfaction and judgments
about procedural justice in their police contacts were summarized and reported to com-
mand staffs on a monthly basis through the departments’ respective Compstat meetings.
We examined the impacts of measuring performance in this way, analyzing citizens’
assessments of procedural justice over time, before and after the initiation of monthly
reporting, and in one city analyzing independent measures of officers’ behavior. We also
interviewed patrol officers and field supervisors to learn about how (if at all) such per-
formance measurement affected police management.
Analytical Framework
Several elements of procedural justice shape citizens’ subjective experience:
•• People are more satisfied when they have an opportunity to “tell their side of
the story”—to explain their situation or behavior to authorities.
•• People are more satisfied when they believe that authorities’ decisions are based
on facts.
•• People are more satisfied when they feel that they have been treated with dig-
nity and respect.
•• People are more satisfied when they trust authorities’ motives, which is more
likely when authorities explain their actions in terms that demonstrate that they
have taken account of citizens’ concerns and needs.1
Procedural justice in police-citizen interactions, theory holds, affects more global atti-
tudes toward the police, particularly “legitimacy,” and empirical evidence substanti-
ates the relationship between procedural justice and public trust in police. These
Worden and McLean
151
findings have been construed to imply that legitimacy is “created” in individual
encounters, and is also created in a more general form by the aggregated actions of
police: “When a police officer responds to a call or stops someone on the street, what
happens affects general feelings that people have regarding the extent to which author-
ities are legitimate and entitled to be obeyed” (National Research Council, 2004, p.
298). Legitimacy, then, appears to comprise a stock that police can either build or
deplete through their performance. It is on this foundation that the procedural justice
model of policing is prescribed as a police reform.
The procedural justice model is long on the forms that procedurally just policing
takes at the street level, but rather short on the managerial steps that police depart-
ments should take to implement the model. We might suppose that police depart-
ments that adopt such a model establish and enforce expectations that their officers
will exercise their authority with procedural justice. Their chief executives make pro-
cedural justice an explicit priority. They embody their expectations in department
policies and procedures. They train their officers in proper police-citizen interaction.
They treat officers with the same procedural justice that they demand of officers in
their encounters with citizens, thereby nurturing officers’ trust in the organization and
their sense of obligation to obey its rules. And they monitor the available indicators
of police performance, such as complaints and uses of force, and recognizing the
limits of these indicators, they make supervisors responsible for spot-checking the
quality of police-citizen encounters. They might even develop more systematic mea-
sures of such performance, conducting periodic surveys of citizens with whom their
officers have contact.
Systematic measures of this kind are used by few police agencies for the purposes
of day-to-day management. With reference to case studies of six police departments
that were, in the 1990s, implementing community policing, Moore (2002, chap. 8)
found that three of the six agencies used citizen complaints as a measure of perfor-
mance with respect to the use of authority, two used repeated citizen surveys to mea-
sure citizen satisfaction, and only one department accorded high overall importance to
performance measurement. The agencies that tapped these sources of information for
performance measures were among the agencies originally selected for study because
they “were judged to be making unusually rapid progress toward community policing”
(Moore, 2002, p. 159), so they are hardly representative.
We should add that the general community surveys that are administered on an
annual or biannual basis by some departments are of limited utility for management
accountability. Measures of performance that are derived no more often than once
every year (or two) are unlikely to either guide police managers or form the basis for
holding them individually accountable (Behn, 2008). And general, community-wide
perceptions of police performance—for example, whether police are in general polite
or fair—may not reflect officers’ performance in police-citizen encounters. We should
also add that the procedural propriety of police actions is not measured validly with
citizen complaints, which are rarely filed even when citizens are dissatisfied with
police service, and which are not infrequently based on misunderstandings of police
procedure or on (intentional or unintentional) misrepresentations of police action.
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If a police department were to survey the people with whom its officers have con-
tact, and incorporate measures of performance based on those surveys into its manage-
ment accountability system, theories of organization form two divergent sets of
expectations for how and with what effects police managers would use the new mea-
sures of performance. Management guru Peter Drucker is reputed to have said that
“what gets measured gets managed.” Thus, we might suppose that with monthly feed-
back about officers’ performance in procedural justice terms, managers would pay
more attention to how, and not merely whether, their subordinates used their authority
and interacted with citizens. As managers—platoon...
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