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When is policing fair?: groups, identity and judgements of the procedural justice of coercive crowd policing

Stott

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Abstract

Procedural justice theory (PJT) is now a widely utilised theoretical perspective in policing research that acknowledges the centrality of police ‘fairness’. Despite its widespread acceptance this paper asserts that there are conceptual limitations that emerge when applying the theory to the policing of crowd events. This paper contends that this problem with PJT is a result of specific assumptions that are highlighted by two studies using a novel experimental approach. Study 1 systematically manipulated the social categories used to describe crowd participants subjected to police coercion. The experiment demonstrates how these social categories dramatically affected participants’ perceptions of the same police action and that it was participants’ relational identification with the police, rather than a superordinate category, that mediated the association between judgements of procedural fairness and intentions to cooperate. In Study 2, using a quasi-experimental design, we then replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating how perceptions of procedural fairness are also influenced by levels of in-group identification. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the data for reconceptualising the social psychological processes mediating these judgements and impacts of police legitimacy.

Acceptance Date Sep 5, 2016
Publication Date Sep 23, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Policing and Society: an international journal of research and policy
Print ISSN 1043-9463
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Pages 647-664
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2016.1234470
Keywords procedural justice, social identity, policing, crowds
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2016.1234470

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