Police Legitimacy and Procedural Justice

Beat Intro
Voiceover
00:00	This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest 
community policing topics facing our nation.

Interview
Katherine McQuay
00:08	My name is Katherine McQuay and, on behalf of the COPS Office, I’d like to 
introduce you to Dr. Tom Tyler, Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor 
of Psychology at Yale Law School. Dr. Tyler is here to talk with us today about 
public perceptions of police, police legitimacy, and the concepts of procedural 
justice. Dr. Tyler, thank you for joining us. Can you describe what it means in 
policing that success in policing depends on public behavior, and public behavior 
depends upon how members of the public perceive the police and interpret police 
interactions?

Dr. Tom Tyler
00:45	Sure. Many of the things that the police do are affected by how the people in the 
public react. For example, when the police deal with someone on the street, they 
want that person to bring their behavior into line with the law. We want the 
person to feel like they ought to do that, ought to accept police authority, ought 
to defer to the police and let the police maintain order in the community. 
Obviously, how easy it is for the police to maintain order and get public 
acceptance depends on how people feel about the police. If people don’t trust the 
police, if people have bad experiences with the police, they’re not likely to 
cooperate.

	There’s also an issue of hostility. The police would really like to get this 
acceptance of their authority without provoking anger, without leading to some 
kind of confrontation, some kind of violence that might hurt the person they’re 
dealing with or even hurt the officer. So again, the way the public feels about the 
police is going to affect how people respond. Do they get angry? Do they get 
upset? Or do they basically see the police officer as a legitimate authority and 
say, “I ought to do what they’re telling me to do.”

	The other thing we want from people in the community to help the police do their 
jobs is for people to follow the law. In an everyday situation, do people obey the 
law? Do they do the things they know they ought to do? If people do those 
things, that minimizes the work the police have to do. They don’t have to be 
stopping people, threatening them, trying to push their behavior into line with the 
law because people are already following the law. When the police are trying to 
resolve some crime, they need the cooperation of the public. Will people report a 
criminal in the community? Will they work with the police to try to deal with 
crimes and identify criminals?

	In all of these ways, the police depend upon the public to make their jobs easier. 
Even though the police can exercise authority when the public doesn’t trust them, 
it’s a lot harder.
	
Katherine
02:54	When is the public more likely to accept the decisions or the authority of the police 
and when are they less likely to?

Tom
03:02	I think one of the really interesting findings of several decades of research on the 
police is that the main thing people react to when they’re dealing with a police 
officer is whether they think that officer is exercising their authority fairly. That 
is, even if that person is receiving a ticket or some other outcome that none of us 
really wants to receive, what we’re really thinking about when we’re reacting to 
the police officer is, “Is this person being fair to me? Are they treating me 
fairly?” This is an idea we call “procedural justice.” It’s something that has come 
out of a number of studies supported by the government to try to understand the 
public’s point of view about policing. Now we have a really clear picture. If the 
police want cooperation from the public, they need to think about how the public 
experiences policing behavior. If the public experiences the police as acting fairly, 
the police get acceptance for their decisions.

Katherine
04:04	Can you describe an example of how police are tackling positive public 
perceptions through procedural fairness?

Tom
04:11	I think a simple way to address this question is to ask, “What are people looking 
for when they are thinking about or reacting to their experience with a police 
officer?” We know that there are four things that they really tend to care about. 
One is the idea of voice: people want the officer to give them a chance to explain 
their situation, to let them tell their side of the story before the officer makes 
some decision about what’s going to happen. People want to see some signs that 
the police officer they’re dealing with is acting in an impartial way, so they’re not 
acting based upon prejudice, they’re following the law, they’re using consistent 
principles. People want to be treated in a respectful way. People are very 
sensitive to discourtesy or a sense of dismissiveness on the part of the officer. 
People want to trust in the integrity of the officer. They want to feel that the 
person they’re dealing with is sincerely trying to do the right thing, trying to 
understand what’s appropriate in the situation. Those are the four principles that 
constantly come up when people are reacting to police officers.

Katherine 
05:27	So if an agency wants to begin to implement procedural fairness, what are some 
things they could start doing very easily?

Tom
05:35	Actually a lot of police departments are actively doing that right now. What are 
they doing? One thing they’re doing is they’re training their officers. They’re 
trying to emphasize during academy training, and during training that is recurrent 
across the officer’s career, that it’s not simply enough to identify criminals or 
stop crime. It’s also very important to act in a way that maintains legitimacy in 
the community so officers see that as a goal. Training procedures have also 
focused on different ways of implementing the law. So for example, when the 
police stop citizens on the street for whatever reason, they explain what’s the 
policy, why do we have this policy, why are we stopping people, why are we 
stopping you, what’s our goal, how’s this related to community concerns. So 
they’re implementing different approaches to exercising authority that make the 
principles of fairness more up front in dealing with citizens.

	I think another very important and very active area right now is changing the 
culture of the police station. It’s hard to ask a police officer to come out of a 
station that’s run like a military establishment and then do things like listen to 
people and explain policies. Police departments themselves are trying to make 
sure that their policies and practices—for example the way they decide how to 
discipline officers, how they do pay and promotion—that those are seen by the 
officers as reflecting fair procedures. So the officers experience fair procedures in 
the station house, they go out on the street, it’s easier for them to follow these 
guidelines for treating people fairly.

Katherine 
07:21	You kind of got out my last question. Obviously there’s a lot in this for the 
community but what’s the advantage for law enforcement?

Tom
07:30	I think that there are several advantages for law enforcement. One advantage is 
the issue of officer safety. We’re always concerned, obviously, about the safety 
of officers. We find that the approach that officers sometimes make to the people 
in the community of trying to dominate the situation by projecting force, while 
officers may think that this is a way to protect their safety, actually research 
suggests that this provokes counter-reactions from people on the street. It raises 
the level of hostility. It escalates conflict. When officers approach people fairly 
and respectfully, they de-escalate conflict. So one advantage is it’s safer.

	Another advantage, it’s a better way to fight crime. You get most of the people 
in the community working with the police. You can reallocate resources that are 
needed to fight serious long-term crime in high-crime areas while relying on most 
of the people in the community to be cooperating. Cooperating by obeying the 
law, cooperating by helping the police, cooperating by following police 
instructions. This lets the police target violent offenders. As we’ve been hearing, 
we know now how to identify a small group of very violent offenders who are a 
big problem. We can target those people and get the cooperation from the 
community in our efforts to do that.

Katherine 
09:00	Terrific. Dr. Tyler, thank you so much for your time and being with us today.


Beat Exit
Voiceover: 	
09:05	The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS 
Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving 
grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, 
developing partnerships, and solving problems.


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