The Influence of Police Treatment and Decision-making on Perceptions of Procedural Justice: A Field Study

• Author: Bo L. Terpstra,Peter W. van Wijck
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00224278211030968
• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Date: 01 May 2023
• Subject Matter: Original Research Article

The Influence of Police

Treatment and

Decision-making on

Perceptions of

Procedural Justice: A

Field Study

Bo L. Terpstra

1

and Peter W. van Wijck

1

Abstract

Objectives: This study examines whether police behavior that signals higher

quality of treatment or decision-making leads to higher perceived proce-

dural justice. Methods: Analyses are based on data collected during police

traffic controls of moped drivers in two Dutch cities over a period of six

months. Police behavior was measured through systematic social observa-

tion (SSO), and data on perceived procedural justice were collected

through face-to-face interviews immediately after the encounters. Linear

regression analysis with bootstrap estimates was used (n ¼218), with an

overall perceived procedural justice scale as the dependent variable in all

regressions. Independent variables included an overall observed procedural

justice index and four separate scales of police trea tment and decision-

making. Results: We find no evidence that police behavior that signals fairer

treatment or decision-making leads to higher perceived procedural justice.

1

Leiden Law School, Leiden University, Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Bo L. Terpstra, Leiden Law School, Leiden University, PO Box 9520, 2300 RA Leiden,

Netherlands.

Email: b.l.terpstra@law.leidenuniv.nl

Journal of Research in Crime and

Delinquency

ªThe Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

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DOI: 10.1177/00224278211030968

journals.sagepub.com/home/jrc

2023, Vol. 60(3) 344–377

Original Research Article

Conclusions: Our findings add to the currently very limited empirical evi-

dence on an important question, and raise questions about a central

idea, that more procedurally just treatment and decision making by author-

ities leads to an increase in p erceived procedural jus tice and enhanced

compliance. The first of these requires more research.

Keywords

procedural justice, behavior, perceptions, field research

Introduction

In recent years, an increasing number of studies have been published on the

fairness of procedures used by the police and other authorities. Overall these

studies find that if citizens feel that they are treated more fairly by legal

authorities, they ascribe more legitimacy to justice institutions and tend to

be more inclined to abide by the law and to cooperate (Murphy 2005; Tyler

1990; Winter and May 2001). The research on this relationship and the

fairness of these procedures, termed “procedural justice” (Cropanzano and

Ambrose 2001), suggests that perceptions are based on two related compo-

nents: quality of treatment and quality of decision making (Blader and Tyler

2003; Gau 2014; Reisig, Bratton, and Gertz 2007; Reisig and Lloyd 2009;

Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tankebe 2009a; Tyler 1990, 2003). The research

seems to imply that an improvement in the quality of treatment and

decision-making by police officers leads citizens more likely to view the

police as a legitimate institution, and in turn, are more likely to comply with

the law and cooperate with police.

However, studies on procedural justice and compliance are generally

based on survey data, so refer to perceived procedural justice rather than

to actual treatment and decision-making by the police, thus essentially

being about what individuals say about how they were treated rather than

being about how they were actually treated, so this conclusion cannot be

clearly drawn. Although one would expect that higher quality of treatment

and decision-making results in higher perceived procedural justice, research

on the relationship of actual behavior to perceptions of it is limited (Nagin

and Telep 2017). Establishing whether actual police treatment and

decision-making influence perceived procedural justice, requires study of

the relationship between data on police behavior and data on citizen percep-

tions. Due to the labor-intensity of the field-research necessary for this, the

345

Terpstra and van Wijck

current body of research on this relationship is very limited and, in the

studies that exist, the results are not consistent (Nagin and Telep 2017).

This inconsistency leads to fundamentally different conclusions. Mazerolle

et al. (2013), for example, conclude that short police-citizen interactions in

traffic stops can be highly influential on perceptions of procedural justice,

while Worden and McLean (2017) conclude that it would be surprising if

one single interaction such as a traffic stop materially altered perceptions of

procedural justice.

The main purpose of the present study is to extend the research on the

relationship between police behavior and perceptions of procedural justice

by answering the following research question: to what extent does police

behavior that signals higher quality of treatment or decision-making lead to

higher perceived procedural justice? To answer this, we investigated inter-

actions between police officers and citizens at polic e traffic controls of

moped drivers in two Dutch cities over a period of six months, using

instruments derived from previous studies to collect data on both perceived

procedural justice and on treatment and decision-making by police officers.

Data on perceived procedural justice were collected using questionnaires

taken from the literature (Gau 2014; Jackson et al. 2012; Sunshine and Tyler

2003; Tyler 1990), and data on actual treatment and decision-making were

collected using a systematic observation protocol taken from the literature

(Jonathan-Zamir, Mastrofski, and Moyal 2015).

In the next section, we present a short review of previous research on

perceived procedural justice and the relationship of these perceptions with

the quality of treatment and decision-making by the police. Following that,

we present a more detailed description of the current study, a description of

the data and the plan of analysis, the results, and conclude with a discussion

of the implications and limitations.

Prior Research

This section presents an overview of prior research regarding the relation

between variations in the quality of treatment and decision-making and

perceived procedural justice. Generally, a distinction is made between four

ingredients of procedural justice: (1) participation, (2) neutrality, (3) dignity

and respect and (4) trust in the motives of the police.

First, we discuss two studies that systematically observed the four ingre-

dients and constructed a procedural justice index (Dai, Frank, and Sun

(2011), Jonathan-Zamir et al. (2015)). The strength of these studies is that

346 Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 60(3)