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This study explores two issues about police legitimacy. The first issue is the relative importance of police legitimacy in shaping public support of the police and policing activities, compared to the importance of instrumental judgments about (1) the risk that people will be caught and sanctioned for wrongdoing, (2) the performance of the police in fighting crime, and/or (3) the fairness of the distribution of police services. Three aspects of public support for the police are examined: public compliance with the law, public cooperation with the police, and public willingness to support policies that empower the police. The second issue is which judgments about police activity determine people's views about the legitimacy of the police. This study compares the influence of people's judgments about the procedural justice of the manner in which the police exercise their authority to the influence of three instrumental judgments: risk, performance, and distributive fairness. Findings of two surveys of New Yorkers show that, first, legitimacy has a strong influence on the public's reactions to the police, and second, the key antecedent of legitimacy is the fairness of the procedures used by the police. This model applies to both while and minority group residents.
Introduction
Mechanisms for social control are a universal feature of all human societies, and it is difficult to imagine a culture that lacks the means of ensuring that its people follow its norms, rules, or laws. Bringing the behavior of members of the public into line with norms, rules, and laws is a core function of legal authorities. As a consequence, understanding how people respond to different potential mechanisms of social control is important to policy makers, legal scholars, and social scientists (Tyler 1990; Tyler & Huo 2002). Our concern here is with public responses to one institution of social control-the police, and to one mechanism of social control-police legitimacy. We examine such responses among two samples of the residents of New York City using questionnaire-based responses to "voice of the community" surveys.
This study has two goals. The first is to test the argument that police legitimacy has an important influence on public support for the police. In this study, we examine the influence of police legitimacy on three aspects of public support: behavioral compliance...