Procedural Justice in Police Officers and Prosecutors in Chile

• In Event: Police Encounters: Examining Attitudes, Experiences, and Consequences

Abstract

The need to adapt criminal justice activity to the standards of fair treatment imposed by the theoretical approach of procedural justice has motivated the development of structured programs to encourage this type of practices, also driven by the need to increase the low level of legitimacy reported in some countries towards criminal justice institutions.

In order to understand the fairness of the services provided by police and prosecutors, we analyze information collected from two evaluation studies of victim assistance programs implemented in Chile, including surveys applied to all the police officers in charge of receiving complaints from victims of gender and sexual violence in Chile (N=120), to users of the prosecutor's office victim services (n=1500), and 60 interviews with police officers, prosecutors and prosecutor's office professionals.

The results allow us to understand how police and prosecutors interact with citizens in key criminal justice activities such as filing complaints, assessing their risk of being revictimized and advising them to appear at court hearings, and how this can modify people's willingness to adhere to the judicial process. We discuss how to improve fairness given by the police and prosecutors in these task and thereby increase the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions.

Authors

• Ulda O. Figueroa, Centro de Estudios Justicia y Sociedad, Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Catalina Rufs, Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Sofia Dupre, Universidad Catolica de Chile

• David Jara, Universidad Catolica de Chile