Getting Away with Murder: Police Non-performance and Trust in the Police

• In Event: 477 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. Policing

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1990’ies, the question of police legitimacy has received increasing amounts of attention from both practitioners and scholars. While disagreements still exists on the measurement of the legitimacy of the police, there seems to be widespread agreement on including the citizens’ trust in the police as a component. Furthermore, a consensus seems to be forming around the idea, that procedural justice is the key antecedent to the legitimacy of the police, compared to other variables such as effectiveness of policing or the fairness of the distribution of police services.
Based on survey data from the Danish part of the European FP7-research project MYPLACE, involving a sample of young Danish citizens (N=936) we propose a new way of measuring citizens’ evaluation of the effectiveness of the police. Our measure relies on a more indirect line of questioning, than the one usually employed. Data suggests that while the perceived fairness of the police officers’ conduct and the procedures used by the police are undoubtedly important for the citizens’ trust in the police, the effectiveness of the police remains an important explanatory factor, even when controlling for the levels of social trust and the fairness of the police.

Authors

• Klaus Levinsen, University of Southern Denmark

• Jon Lund Elbek, University of Southern Denmark