A National Survey for Monitoring Police Legitimacy

• Author: Tom R. Tyler
• DOI: 10.3818/JRP.4.1.2002.71
• Published date: 01 December 2002
• Date: 01 December 2002
• Subject Matter: Article

A national survey for monitoring police legitimacy • 71

*A national survey for monitoring

police legitimacy

Tom R. Tyler

Department of Psychology

New York University

JUSTICE RESEARCH AND POLICY, Vol. 4, Special Issue, Fall 2002

© 2002 Justice Research and Statistics Association

This article is based on a paper prepared for the National Research Council, Division of

Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Committee on Law and Justice, Meeting

of the Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices, Washington, DC,

April 11, 2002.

*Abstract

Most police departments do not currently measure their subjective legitimacy via

surveys of the public. This article argues that such information is valuable, since

public cooperation with the police is linked to the legitimacy of the police in the eyes

of the public. Approaches to measuring subjective legitimacy are reviewed, and ex-

amples of items used in prior studies to tap different, potentially important aspects of

legitimacy are presented and discussed. These can serve as the starting point for fu-

ture efforts to design and validate measures of legitimacy that can be the basis for

police efforts to better understand how they are viewed by the members of the public

in their communities.

72 • Justice Research and Policy

The Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices recognizes the

importance of distinguishing between two aspects of legitimacy: objective legiti-

macy and subjective (i.e., perceived) legitimacy. This distinction is based upon

the belief that it is important both for the police to be legitimate, in the sense that

they bring their actions into line with the law and the norms of appropriate

police conduct, and for the police to be seen as legitimate by the residents of the

communities they protect. It is not enough to focus on the actual quality of police

performance, since police agencies may execute their job duties effectively and

constitutionally and still find themselves without community support.

Of these two aspects of legitimacy, it is objective legitimacy that has received

the most attention in the past several decades. The criminal justice community

widely recognizes the importance of establishing more professional standards

and practices for the police. There have also been many efforts to understand

how those objective standards can be implemented into changes in actual police

behavior. We want the police to be aware of people’s Constitutional rights and to

have strategies through which that awareness shapes actual police conduct.

An important task for the future is to provide the groundwork for being able

to also utilize subjective legitimacy as a criterion of police legitimacy. My pur-

pose is to address issues related to developing and conducting the type of surveys

to monitor police legitimacy that would make the monitoring of subjective legiti-

macy possible. My goal is to provide measurement strategies, so that informa-

tion about public trust and confidence in the police (i.e., “police legitimacy”) can

be assessed and combined with other indices of police performance when seeking

to evaluate the quality of police services.

In addition to the objective/subjective distinction in performance criteria, it

is important to separate two aspects of police activity, each of which might con-

tribute to any effort to evaluate police performance, irrespective of whether the

effort focuses on objective or subjective evaluations. These issues are: 1) police

effectiveness in fighting crime and 2) police adherence to normative standards.

Each of these issues can be assessed both objectively and subjectively.

Objective indicators of police performance in fighting crime include indices

such as the community crime rate, assessments of the level of community disor-

der (graffiti, trash, prostitution, drug use, gangs in the community), and indica-

tors of police adherence to codes of conduct (i.e., the number of allegations of

police authority abuse, the number of police shootings of community residents,

etc.). Such objective indicators of police performance are typically included in

systems like COMPSTAT (computer comparison statistics), which compile sta-

tistical measures of police performance.

Subjective indicators include the judgments made by community residents

about the same issues noted above: police effectiveness in fighting crime and