Police Legitimacy in Australian Community Context

Abstract

Flashpoints of violence across urban communities expose the fault lines of discontent festering between police and community residents. These flashpoints, however, are highly predictable, rarely occurring out-of-the-blue. Police-community relations are more than the sum of their parts. Relationships between police and citizens vary between communities and are contextualized by a range of structural and regulatory characteristics. Knowing the importance of policing in the context of community dynamics, the ACCS Wave 3 introduced a module that linked the community functioning literature with the large international literature on police legitimacy, procedural justice and citizen perceptions of police, creating the opportunity to test the regulatory context of community functioning. In Chapter 6 we situate policing communities in Australia in an international context. In line with the police legitimacy research undertaken in the United Kingdom (see Bradford & Jackson, 2010; Jackson et al., 2013), the United States (Tyler, 1990; Tyler & Huo, 2002) and Trinidad and Tobago (see Kochel, 2012), we explore how citizen perceptions of police are a key factor in understanding community variations in collective efficacy. Drawing on case studies (see Sargeant et al., 2013) and our survey data, we investigate the relationship between police and collective efficacy across communities and assess whether or not police can foster collective efficacy in communities when they demonstrate effectiveness, employ partnership oriented strategies and enforce the law in a legitimate manner. Moreover, we consider whether attitudes towards police change over time and the neighbourhood and individual level factors that might explain those changes.