Procedural Fairness and Compliance with the Law as Predictors of Judgments of Police Legitimacy

Police legitimacy refers to the belief that when the public believes police to be legitimate political authorities, they are more likely to voluntarily comply with the law. The purpose of this study was to test hypotheses derived from Tyler's process-based model of policing using survey data collected from a sample of the population in a large Canadian city. Researchers in the area of police reform have continued to focus on the implementation of coercive compliance-related procedures or processes rather than to address police legitimacy as a means to encourage citizen cooperation and trust in law enforcement officials. Researchers also have not addressed this in Canadian jurisdictions. Primarily, this study sought to validate whether perceptions of procedural fairness, namely the quality of police decision making and quality of treatment, are key antecedents for judgments of police legitimacy which is posited to influence willingness to cooperate with the police and to comply with the law. Data for this study were obtained through a survey distributed to a random selection of residents (n = 427) and analyzed using step-wise linear regression. Findings support previous research that procedural fairness and quality of treatment are predictors of police legitimacy; however, there was not the expected statistically significant relationship between police legitimacy and compliance with the law. This study has contributed to the growing body of research on police legitimacy by further validating the process-based model of policing in Canada. Positive social change implications include the improvement of police organizations by balancing out the need to control and reduce crime while also promoting the necessity for fair treatment and fair decision making on the part of police officers.