Please be Polite: Procedural Justice and Police Reform in Indonesia

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

Abstract

This paper explores whether people in Indonesia would welcome a procedural justice model of policing. I take procedural justice to involve the quality of police decision-making, the quality of treatment extended by police to the public, and moral similitude between police and citizens. While a large volume of work has been published on procedural justice and policing since Tyler’s model was developed in 1990, this work has been predominantly quantitative (and largely grounded in psychology), and almost exclusively based in the US, the UK, and Australia. In exploring the applicability of procedural justice to policing in Indonesia, this article extends the geographic scope of the procedural justice model, and provides a richly contextualised and nuanced account of people’s everyday experiences with police within a procedural justice framework. The article draws on data from nine months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on policing in Indonesia spread between 2011 and 2013. What this data suggests is that people in Indonesia would be receptive to a procedural justice model of policing.

Authors

• Sharyn Davies, Auckland University of Technology

• Adrianus Meliala, University of Indonesia

• John Buttle, Auckland University