Disentangling the Knots: Police Legitimacy, Minority Status, Discrimination and Immigration in 26 European Countries

• In Event: Police Legitimacy and Procedural Justice (1): New Perspectives on Police-Citizen Relations

Abstract

It is often assumed that people from ethnic minority groups grant the police less legitimacy than their majority group counterparts. Yet much recent research suggests a more nuanced picture: in the UK, for example, people from some ethnic minority groups grant the police more legitimacy than their white British counterparts, while those from some other groups grant much less. Moreover the association between police legitimacy and ethnic minority status is potentially confounded by (at least) three other important variables - personal experiences of policing, wider societal discrimination and, for a significant proportion of the minority group population in many national contexts, immigration. In this paper data from the 2010 European Social Survey are used to unpick the potential effects of these factors on police legitimacy. Pooling data from 26 European countries we find that there is no consistent link between minority status and legitimacy judgements. However people’s experiences of policing, of wider discrimination in society, and, first generation immigrants, of the difference in institutional contexts between country of origin and country of destination all have unique associations with police legitimacy.

Authors

• Ben Bradford, University of Oxford

• Jonathan Jackson, London School of Economics