Police Legitimacy and Homicide: A Macro-comparative Analysis

• In Event: 033 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 11. Policing 1

Abstract

This study conducts a cross-national analysis of the association between police legitimacy and the homicide rate. I perform a statistical test of this relationship using a cross-national time series dataset of 87 countries. The analysis suggests a strong, negative and robust relationship between the public’s belief in the legitimacy of the police and the homicide rate, controlling for a variety of socioeconomic and political variables. The paper makes a major contribution to the literature in providing evidence that police legitimacy is not related only to attitudes towards the use of violence, but also to actual violent behaviour, and that this relationship is generalizable across a wide range of cultural contexts.

Author

• Andrew Dawson, Glendon College, York University