Evaluating the shared and unique predictors of legal cynicism and police legitimacy from adolescence into early adulthood

In different theoretical traditions, negative social conditions, attachments, and interactions shape the way individuals view the law and its agents. Although most researchers acknowledge the conceptual distinction between different legal attitudes such as legal cynicism and police legitimacy, it remains unclear to what extent these attitudes stem from the same social sources. In the current study, therefore, we evaluate the social and individual factors that influence trajectories of legal cynicism and police legitimacy using a diverse community sample of youths in Zurich, Switzerland. Latent growth curve models were employed to examine patterns of change in legal cynicism and police legitimacy between 13 and 20 years of age. The findings show that legal cynicism and police legitimacy both decline into early adulthood and exhibit high rank-stability over time. Furthermore, we find that legal cynicism is closely related to individual characteristics that reflect one's inability to recognize or abide by their internal rules. By contrast, police legitimacy is shaped by socialization influences, particularly teacher bonds and police contacts. These results indicate a need to assess the measurement and interpretation of legal cynicism critically in relation to broader legitimacy beliefs and to investigate the shared and distinct sources of these different constructs.     

Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism

Research has shown that legal cynicism is pervasive among residents of poor, black neighborhoods. However, controlling for crime rates, these residents call police at higher rates than whites and residents of middle‐class neighborhoods, and ethnographic research suggests that mothers in particular sometimes exact social control over partners and children through police notification. Given these findings, how might researchers better understand how legal cynicism and occasional reliance on police fit together? Drawing on interviews with poor African‐American mothers in Washington, DC, this article develops an alternative conception of cultural orientations about law: situational trust. This concept emphasizes micro‐level dynamism in cultural conceptions of the police, expanding the literature on police trust by emphasizing situational contingency. Mothers deploy at least four alternative strategies that produce moments of trust: officer exceptionalism, domain specificity, therapeutic consequences, and institutional navigation. These strategies shed light on the contextual meanings of safety and legitimacy.     

Legal Socialization of Children and Adolescents

Research on children and the law has recently renewed its focus on the development of children's ties to law and legal actors. We identify the developmental process through which these relations develop as legal socialization, a process that unfolds during childhood and adolescence as part of a vector of developmental capital that promotes compliance with the law and cooperation with legal actors. In this paper, we show that ties to the law and perceptions of law and legal actors among children and adolescents change over time and age. We show that neighborhood contexts and experiences with legal actors shape the outcomes of legal socialization. Children report lower ratings of legitimacy of the law and greater legal cynicism when they view interactions with legal actors as unfair and harsh. We show that perceived legitimacy of law and legal authorities shapes compliance with the law, and that these effects covary with social contexts including neighborhood. We identify neighborhood differences in this relationship that reflect differential experiences of children with criminal justice authorities and other social control agents. The results suggest that legal actors may play a role in socialization processes that lead to compliance with or rejection of legal and social norms. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Procedural Justice and Order Maintenance Policing: A Study of Inner‐City Young Men’s Perceptions of Police Legitimacy

There is tension between the core tenets of procedural justice and those of order maintenance policing. Research has shown that citizens’ perceptions of procedural justice influence their beliefs about police legitimacy, yet at the same time, some order maintenance policing efforts stress frequent stops of vehicles and persons for suspected disorderly behavior. These types of programs can threaten citizens’ perceptions of police legitimacy because the targeted offenses are minor and are often not well‐defined. Citizens stopped for low‐level offenses may view such stops as a form of harassment, as they may not believe they were doing anything to warrant police scrutiny. This paper examines young men’s self‐described experiences with this style of proactive policing. Study findings highlight that order maintenance policing strategies have negative implications for police legitimacy and crime control efforts via their potential to damage citizens’ views of procedural justice.     

Resisting the Enforcement of Sexual Harassment Law

Most people in the United States believe that sexual harassment should be illegal and that enforcement is necessary. In spite of such widespread support for antiharassment regulations, sexual harassment policy training provokes backlash and has been shown to activate traditional gender stereotypes. Using in‐depth interviews and participant observations of sexual harassment policy training sessions, this study uncovers the micro‐level mechanisms that underlie ambivalence about the enforcement of sexual harassment law. I find that while the different locations of men and women in the status hierarchy lead to different manifestations of resistance, gender stereotypes are used to buttress perceptions that sexual harassment laws threaten norms of interaction and status positions that men and women have an interest in maintaining. The research has implications for understanding the role of law in social change, legal compliance, and the potential/limits of law for reducing inequality.     

Perceptions of Legitimacy: The Sex of the Legal Messenger and Reactions to Sexual Harassment Training

Research shows that exposure to sexual harassment policy sometimes activates traditional gender stereotypes. This article examines whether the sex of the legal messenger moderates reactions to the enforcement of sexual harassment laws. We employ a 2 × 2 experimental design in which we measure the effect of a sexual harassment policy intervention on male participants’ gender beliefs. The design varies whether the person communicating the policy information is male or female. We find that female policy trainers activate implicit gender stereotypes, but explicit gender egalitarian beliefs. Other than improving men's perceptions of women's considerateness, the policy has little effect on beliefs in the conditions with a male trainer. These results suggest that the effect of law on social change is contingent on characteristics of the legal messengers. Findings contribute to our understanding of gender inequality and legitimacy processes and have practical implications for implementing effective policy.     

CYNICAL STREETS: NEIGHBORHOOD SOCIAL PROCESSES AND PERCEPTIONS OF CRIMINAL INJUSTICE*

Studies have found that African Americans are more likely to perceive racial biases in the criminal justice system than are those from other racial groups. There is a limited understanding of how neighborhood social processes affect variation in these perceptions. This study formulates a series of hypotheses focused on whether perceived racial biases in the criminal justice system or perceptions of injustice vary as a function of levels of moral and legal cynicism as well as of adverse police–citizen encounters. These hypotheses are tested with multilevel regression models applied to data from a sample of 689 African Americans located in 39 neighborhoods. Findings from the regression models indicate that the positive association between structural disadvantage and perceptions of injustice is accounted for by moral and legal cynicism. Furthermore, adverse police encounters significantly increase perceptions of injustice; controlling for these encounters reduces the strength of the association between cynicism and injustice perceptions. Finally, the findings reveal that cynicism intensifies the association between adverse police encounters and perceptions of criminal injustice. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for research regarding perceived biases in the criminal justice system and neighborhood social processes.     

An administrative dilemma: Sexual harassment and liability

Conservative estimates suggest that 40% of working women and 15% of their male counterparts have experienced some form of sexual harassment; and law enforcement personnel are no exception. Police officers are expected to adhere to the highest ethical standards and are subjected to greater public scrutiny than civilians. With criminal and civil remedies readily available to deter police misconduct, police agencies should be establishing policies that take a strong, pro-active stance against sexual harassment in the workplace. Surprisingly, though, 34% of police agencies in this country are still without formal policies regulating such behavior. This article is a guide to the legislation and case law that regulates those behaviours. Recommendations for policy formulation and implementation also are included. sexual harassment in the workplace presents a clear and present danger to law enforcement agencies. A recent survey found that thirty-four percent of law enforcement agencies in the United States have yet to formulate a written sexual harassment policy.     

Assessing the Direct and Indirect Effects of Legitimacy on Public Empowerment of Police: A Study of Public Support for Police Militarization in America

The process‐based model dominates contemporary American research on police‐community relations and perceptions of police. A sizable literature has examined the linkages between procedural justice, legitimacy, compliance with the law, and cooperation with police. Less examined is the relationship between legitimacy and public empowerment of police. This study examines this relationship, focusing on police militarization. We first examine the direct effect of legitimacy on public willingness to allow police to become more militarized. Drawing from cognitive psychology and rational choice theories, we then consider indirect paths between legitimacy and empowerment, concentrating on two anticipated consequences of militarization—an increase in police effectiveness and possible harm to civil liberties. Using a national sample of over 700 American adults, and structural equation modeling, results indicate legitimacy has both direct and indirect effects on police empowerment, in part by shaping assessments of the possible consequences of empowerment. Implications for theory and policy are discussed.     

Drug Globalization: Eventual Legalization of Beer in Iceland and Marihuana Decriminalization in the USA

This article discusses whether different motivations for and perceptions of the police role, either as ‘law and order‐oriented thrill‐seekers’ or as ‘social workers’ lead officers to adopt different approaches towards the public. The first category police rank‐and‐file officers' desire for action and excitement, causing them to perceive policing as a mission, also causes them to have a distorted view of reality whereby they perceive members of the public either as significant adversaries or as insignificant ones. For them, ‘real police work’ means chasing and catching villains, and this delusional picture of what policing is may lead them to enlarge and redefine ‘insignificant criminals’ and thus perceive them as ‘villains’ who merit and justify police targeting. However, as these insignificant criminals—beggars, drug addicts, vagrants, ethnic minority youths, and drunks—are not perceived as actually ‘significant adversaries’, the targeting of and encounters with them also produce fatigue in police officers as these activities fail to comply with many police officers' desire to ‘catch the villain’, and the encounters are repetitive and tedious. Police fatigue and stereotyping may entail cynicism due to the ways in which some groups respond to police targeting, such as accusing the police of racism or threatening them with complaints. It is argued that the first type of police officers to a larger degree will experience fatigue and cynicism than the second type of officers—‘the social workers’—who are motivated by a will to ‘help others’, and who receive more rewarding responses from the public.     

PUBLIC COOPERATION WITH THE POLICE IN GHANA: DOES PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS MATTER?*

Recent criminological emphasis on the salience of normative concerns, such as procedural fairness and legitimacy, in understanding public law‐abiding behavior has been based on evidence from Anglo‐American studies. This article examines these issues in the African context based on general survey data from Accra, Ghana. The results show a lack of empirical validity, in the Ghanaian context, of the Sunshine–Tyler legitimacy scale. The results also show that public cooperation with the police in Ghana is shaped by utilitarian factors such as perceptions of current police effectiveness infighting crime. It is argued that the importance of perceived police effectiveness to public cooperation is a result of police legitimation deficits and the public's alienation from the Ghana police, which in turn are traced to the colonial history of the police and current poor police performance.     

Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight

Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a “second‐order” layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in‐depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawaii reveal how law enforcement practices not only affect cockfighting rituals, but are embedded within them. Police practices and informal rules work in concert to shape fighters' second‐order beliefs. These beliefs have implications for participants' understanding of central concepts, including order, disorder, and illegality. Examining legal consciousness from a second‐order perspective also underscores that notions of legitimacy are constantly created and recreated. Recognizing legitimacy's inherently relational nature helps us understand how experiences of law are synthesized into beliefs—for example, when an unusual police action directed toward a subgroup of fighters compromised the law's legitimacy for them. Foregrounding the relational nature of legal consciousness offers scholars a means to better understand and operationalize the dynamic nature of human relationships to law.     

Neighborhood climates of legal cynicism and complaints about abuse of police power†

Research findings show that legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system, and police is expressed—is important in understanding neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, particularly in racially isolated African American communities. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for understanding neighborhood variation in complaints about police misconduct. Using data on complaints filed in Chicago between 2012 and 2014, we show that grievances disproportionately came from racially segregated neighborhoods and that a measure of legal cynicism from the mid-1990s predicts complaints about abuse of police power two decades later. The association between legal cynicism and complaints is net of prior complaints, reported crime, imprisonment, and other structural factors that contribute to the frequency and nature of interactions involving police and residents. Legal cynicism also mediates the influence of racially isolated neighborhoods on complaints. The mid-1990s is the approximate midpoint of a half-century of police scandals in Chicago. Our research findings suggest that contemporary complaints about police misconduct in highly segregated Chicago neighborhoods are grounded in collectively shared historical memories of police malfeasance. They also suggest that persistent complaints about police misconduct may represent officially memorialized expressions of enduring racial protest against police abuse of power.     

Europeanization or National Specificity? Legal Approaches to Sexual Harassment in France, 2002–2012

This paper examines whether—and if so how—a 2002 European Directive on sexual harassment has changed the practice and content of sexual harassment law in France. It finds that the European Directive shaped how French courts address sexual harassment and informed the content of a new sexual harassment law France passed in 2012. Yet, its influence has been mediated by dominant national attitudes about: (1) the nature of sexual harassment, (2) which legal institutions are best suited to address it, and (3) the character of women who claim to have been harassed. This paper further suggests that news reporting on a 2011 arrest of a French politician for sexual assault led to more positive attitudes about sexual harassment victims.     

LEGAL CYNICISM,COLLECTIVE EFFICACY,AND THE ECOLOGY OF ARREST*

Ethnographic evidence reveals that many crimes in poor minority neighborhoods evade criminal justice sanctioning, thus leading to a negative association between the proportion of minority residents in a neighborhood and the arrest rate. To explain this finding, we extend recent theoretical explications of the concept of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism refers to a cultural orientation in which the law and the agents of its enforcement are viewed as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety. Crime might flourish in neighborhoods characterized by legal cynicism because individuals who view the law as illegitimate are less likely to comply with it; yet because of legal cynicism, these crimes might go unreported and therefore unsanctioned. This study draws on data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to test the importance of legal cynicism for understanding geographic variation in the probability of arrest. We find that, in neighborhoods characterized by high levels of legal cynicism, crimes are much less likely to lead to an arrest than in neighborhoods where citizens view the police more favorably. Findings also reveal that residents of highly cynical neighborhoods are less likely to engage in collective efficacy and that collective efficacy mediates the association between legal cynicism and the probability of arrest.     

‘The biggest gang in Oakland’: re-thinking police legitimacy

Literature defining ‘police legitimacy’ lacks qualitative research on those populations most often targeted by law enforcement agencies, including people of color in urban areas. This same literature defines police legitimacy as something unquestionable and automatic. Exploration of this concept is limited to strategies to increase public ‘trust’ in police, and public compliance to their authority. We address these limitations in the available scholarship through an analysis of interviews with a diverse sample of Oakland (CA) residents on their experiences with the Oakland Police Department (OPD). Their narratives are presented in the historical context of controversy, budget problems, federal investigations, and racialized violence that help to define the relationship between OPD and Oakland communities. Those interviewed, universally observed OPD’s failure to address the most common crime problems in the city, while others, particularly people of color, found them to be a personal or public threat to safety. Their narratives fly in the face of the manifest functions of municipal police forces, are fully supported by the contemporary empirical history of the OPD, and suggest the illegitimate authority – including the monopoly on the use of force – of organizations like OPD in a democratic society.     

Legitimacy in corrections

Research Summary
To extend research on legitimacy to the correctional system, we study a sample of 202 adult inmates randomly assigned to serve their 6-month sentence at one of two institutions—a traditional prison or a military-style correctional boot camp. Findings show that perceptions of justice system legitimacy changed during the course of incarceration, that the prison (but not the boot camp) proved delegitimizing, and that certain regime characteristics explained why.
Policy Implications
Across academic disciplines, studies continue to link compliance with perceived legitimacy. Compliance with the law, for instance, is related closely to the legitimacy of the justice system and its actors. These findings suggest implementing legitimacy-building policies such as procedurally fair treatment and decision making by police officers and judges. This article, by finding legitimacy to be malleable even at the final stage of the justice process, proposes the efficacy of similar policies in the correctional system. As research from England and Wales has shown, legitimizing strategies in this context could increase compliance both during and after incarceration.     

Victims’ perceptions of the police response as a predictor of victim cooperation in the Netherlands: a prospective analysis

The current study prospectively explores whether crime victims’ willingness to cooperate with the police is predicted by victims’ perceptions of police officers’ behaviour with regard to their case through their perceptions of police legitimacy. Structural equation modelling was used to examine the interrelationships between the study variables while controlling for baseline values among a sample of 201 crime victims in the Netherlands. Results indicate that victims’ perceptions of procedural justice and police performance were predictive of both indicators of perceived police legitimacy (i.e. obligation to obey the law and trust in the police). Moreover, victims’ willingness to cooperate with the police was indirectly predicted by victims’ perceptions of procedural justice and police performance, through their perceptions of obligation to obey the law. These findings suggest that police officers may play an important role in stimulating victims’ willingness to cooperate with the police by treating victims fairly and by taking investigative actions to solve the crime.     

Sexual harassment in higher education: a victim's remedies and a private university's liability

Sexual harassment is a pervasive problem in education. With victims of harassment pursuing administrative and judicial redress, an awareness of and a program for response to the sexual harassment issue are good risk management strategies for a private university and its staff, employees, and students. This article examines, first, the two types of sexual harassment recognized by law; second, the situations in which harassment in the educational context may occur; and, third, avenues of recourse for the victim of sexual harassment and the responsibility and liability of the private university when the harassment is reported or discovered. It is designed to inform and educate the faculty and administrators of private universities about the legal implications of their response to notice of sexual harassment.     

Gender Harassment: Broadening Our Understanding of Sex-Based Harassment at Work

This study challenges the common legal and organizational practice of privileging sexual advance forms of sex-based harassment, while neglecting gender harassment. Survey data came from women working in two male-dominated contexts: the military and the legal profession. Their responses to the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ) revealed five typical profiles of harassment: low victimization, gender harassment, gender harassment with unwanted sexual attention, moderate victimization, and high victimization. The vast majority of harassment victims fell into one of the first two groups, which described virtually no unwanted sexual advances. When compared to non-victims, gender-harassed women showed significant decrements in professional and psychological well-being. These findings underscore the seriousness of gender harassment, which merits greater attention by both law and social science.