Who loses faith in the law? Examining individual and community-level drivers of legal cynicism

• In Event: Perception on police methods and legal cynicism

Abstract

How people view the law and their attitudes towards legal institutions has been the focus of a great deal of research. Understanding what shapes these attitudes is important as negative attitudes have been associated with reduced trust in the criminal justice system, lower compliance with the law and criminal justice actors, and reduced help-seeking. One such key attitude is legal cynicism, referring to a pessimistic attitude towards the law in which individuals reject the social norms that form the basis of the law and lead them to view laws or rules as not binding (Cavanagh et al., 2020; Sampson & Bartusch, 1998). Legal cynicism has been used to explain the relationship between negative policing experiences and anti-social attitudes and behaviours. However, some have questioned whether these anomic views towards legal actors and the law can be transmitted simply through vicarious exposure to community factors such as crime and over-policing, or whether it is specific negative experiences with police in these locations that form legally cynical attitudes. We test the potential mediating role of frequency of police contact and intrusiveness of police contact in the relationship between perceptions of crime, over-policing, and police legitimacy within respondents’ local communities and their perceptions of legal cynicism. Drawing on a tertiary education sample of 411 respondents aged 18 years and older in Queensland, Australia, we find differences in the mediating role of quantity versus quality of police contact, such that more frequent police contact, whether intrusive or not, is a key mediator of the relationship between perceptions of crime and over-policing in respondents’ communities and their attitudes of legal cynicism. The findings of this study shed light on the role of police-encounters in shaping people’s cynicism towards legal actors and the law in high crime areas.

Authors

• Natasha Madon, Griffith University

• Molly McCarthy, Deakin University

• Shaun McClaws, Deakin University