Police Legitimacy and Symbolic Representation: Gender and Subjective Assessments of Police Performance

• In Event: Posters I

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether female representation within law enforcement influences citizens’ perceptions of police legitimacy and to test whether the connection between this form of symbolic representation and institutional legitimacy is independent of processes grounded in experiential-based mechanisms. Participants were asked to read a vignette about a Special Victims Squad in a fictitious police department in the Midwest and to provide their assessments of police legitimacy. The project was a two-by-two experiment with the first condition being the gender of the police leader and the gender composition of the unit, and the second condition being the percentage of sexual assault and domestic violence incidents that resulted in an arrest. The unit with a female leader and a female-dominated team was rated higher in terms of trust, confidence, fairness, performance, compliance and leadership compared with the unit with a male leader and a male-dominated team, even after controlling for the other variables. These findings suggest that recruiting and retaining more women in law enforcement, as well as promoting more female officers to leadership positions, may strengthen citizen support for the police, particularly in gendered policy areas where the victims are disproportionately women.

Authors

• Amie Schuck, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Paola Baldo, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Christopher Powell, University of Illinois at Chicago