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In this paper we demonstrate that people's cooperation with the police is motivated in part by their judgment that the police are prototypical representatives of the group's moral values, as is predicted by the social identity approach. We further show that people evaluate the degree to which the police reflect the group's moral values by assessing the fairness of the procedures they use to exercise their authority, as is argued by the relational model of authority. Finally, the social identity approach and the relational model of authority are shown to interact: people who are uncertain about their status in the group are shown to be concerned more strongly about procedural justice issues than about issues of distributive justice.
In this paper we attempt to clarify why people support and cooperate with the police. We are concerned about three types of support: compliance with the law, cooperation with the police, and willingness to empower the police with discretionary authority. Our interest is in the motivations that shape these types of public support. We contrast two motivations-instrumental and moral-and explore the importance of each.
Instrumental Motivations for Supporting the Police
One model is based on the view of people's connection to groups as instrumental. One instrumental model suggests that people support the police when they regard them as a credible agent of social control (the risk model); the other links support to a view of the police as effective in managing social disorder (the performance model).
Risk. One function of legal authorities is to prevent crime by increasing the likelihood that rule breakers will be caught and punished (Tyler 1990). This belief is represented by the idea of deterrence. Effective deterrence is achieved by increasing the number of officers on the street, increasing arrests, and/or increasing the threat or use of force by the police. Hence we might predict that people will cooperate with the police, at least by obeying the law, when they think that risks for noncompliance are high.
Performance. Why might people cooperate with the police in fighting crime and public disorder? One possible reason is that they think the police are effective in fighting crime (Tyler 2001; Tyler and Huo 2002). If the police are regarded as effective, community residents may view...