Explicitly Testing the Relationship Between Police Legitimacy and Code of the Streets Values

• In Event: Race, Culture and Violence

Abstract

Anderson (1999)'s Code of the Streets' account of the formation of a delinquent subculture is replete with references to the role of the police. For instance, Anderson (1999:10) suggests that adherence to Code of the Streets (COTS) begins where the law ends and that those who adhere to COTS view the criminal justice system as unfair (Anderson 1999:66). Indeed, even after Anderson (1999), many other scholars have made reference to the potential relationship between lack of police legitimacy and COTS values without explicitly testing for its existence (e.g. Kubrin and Weitzer, 2003).

A second gap in the COTS literature is that the generality of the theory has not received much exploration. More specifically, while the implication of COTS is that it applies only to African-Americans, the few studies that have tended to explore the racial (in)variance of the theory are ethnographies (e.g. Carr et al. 2007).

The current study will address these gaps using data from the Seattle Neighborhoods Crime Survey (Matsueda, 2010) to measure the relationship between perceived police legitimacy and COTS values; the study will also disaggregate by race to explore a racial invariance hypothesis.

Author

• Aaron Safer-Lichtenstein, University of Maryland