Police Self-Legitimacy Research Paper

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In many ways, these are the best times for legitimacy in criminology. For decades, legitimacy had been peripheral in criminological research although it was a central concept in both political science and sociology. In many ways, this inattention to legitimacy was due to a general historical tendency for criminologists to avoid normative issues. The situation today is different; legitimacy is now an established topic in criminological studies, with an explosion in empirical research about its antecedents and consequences. The impetus for the remarkable change of fortune for legitimacy can undoubtedly be traced to the pioneering work of Tom Tyler, beginning with his Why People Obey the Law. Tyler’s procedural justice arguments have been studied in different contexts, focusing principally on everyday interactions between criminal justice agents – such as prisons and police officers – and citizens. The results from these studies consistently show that public perceptions of police legitimacy shape general compliance with the law, cooperation with legal authorities, recidivism in spousal assault, and even support for vigilante self-help.

Notwithstanding this important advancement in our understanding of legitimacy, some areas of legitimacy remain underdeveloped. One of these is the police’s views of their own legitimacy. To date, the dominant approach to legitimacy is from the standpoint of citizens; thus, various empirical analyses attempt to assess the conditions associated with citizens’ views of the legitimacy or otherwise of the police. Yet one must equally be attentive to the belief and the confidence that officers have in their own legitimacy because such a belief can have important implications for how they carry out their work and for the cultivation of legitimacy among citizens. Max Weber, to whom we owe much for the stature of legitimacy in contemporary social science, emphasized their duality of legitimacy (see further below).

This dimension of legitimacy from the standpoint of power-holders is what has been described as power-holder legitimacy or self-legitimacy (Bottoms and Tankebe 2012). Self-legitimacy refers to a belief on that part of power-holders, such as the police, that the positions they occupy and their attendant roles are morally acceptable and justified to themselves. It is, in other words, about the self-recognition of entitlement to power. Unlike organization legitimacy, which focuses on power-holders’ views of the organization, self-legitimacy is concerned with power-holders’ views of their own individual legitimacy. What relationship exists, if any, between self-legitimacy and organizational legitimacy is yet to be empirically examined. This research paper presents a brief theoretical analysis of self-legitimacy, hypothesizing a number of factors that might shape officers’ self-legitimacy. It also discusses the consequences of police self-legitimacy.

Understanding Police Self-Legitimacy

A surfeit of definitions of legitimacy exists in the social sciences. However, many of these definitions are one-dimensional, in that they approach legitimacy from the standpoint of those subject to power; the views and beliefs of those who govern are often not taken into account. There are however a few exceptions, the most instructive of which is perhaps that offered decades ago by Dolf Sternberger: “legitimacy is the foundation of such governmental power as is exercised both with a consciousness on the government’s part that it has a right to govern and with some recognition by the governed of that right” (1968: 244). There are many attractive elements in this definition, of which three are particularly noteworthy. First is its emphasis on the normative character of legitimacy that it is a positive recognition of the moral right to be in a position of power. Second, it is necessarily conditional; legitimacy of any power-holder or institution can be squandered or “deliberately nourished.” Third, it extends both to the power-holders and to their audiences. The focus of this research paper is on how power-holders, in particular police officers, legitimate their authority in their own eyes.

As with all contemporary analysis of legitimacy in the social sciences, the starting point of self-legitimacy is Max Weber. Weber argued that power-holders have a need to cultivate legitimacy of their power and positions not only for the purposes of securing the cooperation of their power-subjects but for their own personal consumption. As he put it, the powerful have a need to “persuade themselves that their fates are deserved and therefore rightful” (Kronman 1983: 41). In Weber’s conception, self-legitimacy is a necessary precondition for claiming legitimacy among citizens. “To the extent that he anticipates and understands the criticism of those who are less fortunate, the man of good fortune must already be a critic himself” (Kronman 1983: 41).

Weber did not develop his analysis of this dimension of legitimacy as fully as he did the audience dimension. Nonetheless, the authors argue that because of the central place that Weber assigned to formal legality in his treatise on audience legitimacy, it might be reasonable to suspect that it would have been the grounds on which power-holders would seek to justify the rightness of their power to themselves. In other words, police officers will believe in their own legitimacy if and only if they ensure that the positions they occupy, the powers they wield, and the manner in which such powers are exercised on a day-to-day basis are formally and legally correct. Yet, legality is not sufficient to establish legitimacy; in addition to legality, those in power must also be able to convince themselves that their claims to legitimacy is justified in terms of a society’s shared values and beliefs. Dennis Wrong has emphasized this need for reference to the shared beliefs held both by rulers and by those who are governed, when he notes that power-holders have:

a need to believe that the power they possess is morally justified, that they are servants of a larger collective goal or system of values surpassing mere determination to perpetuate themselves in power, [and] that their exercise of power is not inescapably at odds with hallowed standards of morality. (1995: 51)

However, analysis of power-holder legitimacy in the political science literature has tended to focus almost exclusively on the ruling elite, thereby potentially missing the significant role in social order played by more junior power holders (such as basic-grade police and prison officers), who are in direct contact with citizens and often exercise a significant degree of local power on a daily basis. Such local power-holders of course play crucial roles in all law enforcement agencies. Nonetheless, “as dominated dominators or, more precisely, as dominated parties within the field of power” (Bourdieu as cited in Frow 2000: 313), such junior power-holders are a special group. For example, patrolling police officers are “the state made flesh. [.. .] they are the most direct representatives of the state for citizens given their visible, uniformed, 24-h presence on the streets and their crucial involvement in social intervention and law enforcement” (Punch 2000: 322); but simultaneously, they can sometimes be the least powerful group within a large criminal justice agency. The decisions of police managers undoubtedly set limits and create opportunities for ordinary officers. Similarly, however, the nature and outcome of everyday police–public interactions may lead to outcomes that necessitate a recalibration of the modes of external legitimacy and a transformation of police practices and procedures. Given this, it would seem that the problem of ordinary police officers’ cultivation of self-confidence in their own moral entitlement to exercise power is a question that has to be taken seriously. Indeed, for street-level officers, it might be hypothesized that the further one climbs downwards on the rungs of organizational structure, the greater the energy, time, and intensity of legitimation for the confirmation of claims to authority.

A central conceptual problem for self-legitimacy concerns the “disconnected” power holder who has lost touch with the public he or she serves and takes an “I am always right” position (Bottoms and Tankebe 2012). Unfortunately, under certain circumstances members of police services can easily slide into this kind of attitude, as seen in, for example, the too-frequent abuse of power in policing, in so-called noble cause corruption, where officers subscribe to the view that it is appropriate to manufacture evidence against a suspect because “he is clearly guilty anyway.” In such instances, officers are implicitly making claims to possession of a higher normative validity than that which the State represents; adherence to such a norm is, in their view, a necessity for society to survive. By contrast to these approaches, a healthier view of self-legitimacy asserts that “means and ends are not separate; the things we care about profoundly affect how we honour [them]” (Archer 2000: 84). In a criminal justice context, self-legitimacy is therefore best understood as the cultivation of self-confidence in the moral rightness of power-holders’ authority, within a framework of both official laws and regulations, and societal normative expectations (Bottoms and Tankebe 2012).

As noted previously, police researchers have not yet paid sufficient attention to self-legitimacy in their empirical analyses of legitimacy. It is nonetheless important to note that the main thrust of this dimension of legitimacy is at least implicit in Muir’s (1977) in-depth field on good policing, as well as an empirical description of ways in which police deviate from it. A core element of Muir’s argument is that police officers are moral animals and that they wrestle with justifying their actions in moral terms. That is, they need to construct moral arguments about “the rightness of their cause,” which is at the core of the idea of self-legitimacy. Muir famously identified four “types” of officers – professionals, enforcers, reciprocators, and avoiders – each with different orientations to their work but all seeking some way to justify their actions in particular and their work styles in general. Officers with a greater sense of self-legitimacy approximate Muir’s professional officers:

The professional response never involved an indefensible violation of the law. Any apparent illegality, if there was one, was always put in an understandable and acceptable light, openly and publicly justified. Nor did the professional response amount to the naked assertion of the law. The law was invoked after careful preparation of a foundation of knowledge, or fearfulness, or both. (1977: 144–145)

What Factors Promote Self-Legitimacy?

Practically and theoretically, the problem of understanding the conditions that help to create and sustain police self-legitimacy is of immense importance. However, empirically, not much is known about those conditions. Part of the reason is that this dimension of legitimacy has been undeveloped. However, it is possible to hypothesize a number of such factors that might relate to officer self-legitimacy. That is the aim of this section of the paper. Specifically, it will consider the possible role of procedural justice, relational social capital, and experiences of misconduct, and effectiveness in crime prevention.

Procedural Justice

Jack Barbalet has argued that “feelings of confidence arise from acceptance and recognition in social relationships” (2001: 87). Within this context, procedural justice becomes potentially useful in analysis of officers’ feelings of confidence in their own legitimacy. Procedural justice is now an established area of criminological research. It refers to the perceived fairness of the procedures used to determine specific outcomes. In more developed work, procedural justice has itself been shown to comprise two separate elements: namely, quality of decision-making (e.g., did the citizen have a fair opportunity to state his/her point of view?) and quality of treatment (i.e., how far was the citizen treated as a person with human dignity and respect?).

There is a growing body of empirical studies that show procedural justice is the predominant determinant of citizens’ perceptions of police legitimacy. Among power-holders, a study by Tyler, Callahan, and Frost (2007: 476) found that assessments of legitimacy made by both law enforcement agents and soldiers were significantly influenced by procedural justice. Tyler and his colleagues were concerned with evaluations of organizational legitimacy rather than the individual officers’ self-confidence in their own legitimacy. Yet it is reasonable to hypothesize that procedural justice can be important in promoting self-legitimacy among police officers. Indeed, in his study in Ghana, Tankebe (2007) reported that officers who perceived that they had been treated with fairly by their supervisors were those who expressed greater confidence in their self-legitimacy.

Relational Social Capital

According to Coleman (1988: 101), “a group within which there is extensive trustworthiness and extensive trust is able to accomplish much more than a comparable group without that trustworthiness and trust.” It is a group characterized by the so-called relational social capital, and is considered “an aid in accounting for different outcomes at the level of individual actors” (Coleman 1988: 101). The general notion of social capital is not new to criminology; there is a strong body of evidence demonstrating the role of conventional social capital suppresses offending and protects against victimizations (McCarthy et al. 2002), while criminal social capital facilitates it (Hagan and McCarthy 1997). Among police officers, the police subculture literature suggests that relational social capital among officers can be an important resource for getting police work done as much as it can facilitate misconduct among officers. The concern of the present analysis is to extend the notion of relational social capital to the legitimacy discussion by exploring its influence on officers’ understandings of their own legitimacy. As previously argued, following Barbalet (2001), feelings of confidence have their foundation in social relations; thus, we expect officers’ self-confidence in their legitimacy to arise from situations of high relational social capital. This is supported by Tankebe’s (2007) study in Ghana, which found that officers with strained relationships with their colleagues were those who expressed lesser degrees of self-legitimacy. This is consistent with Muir’s (1977) study, which emphasized the role of social capital (the attachment to and views of one’s peers) to the cultivation, maintenance, and reproduction of officers’ self-legitimacy.

The salience of relational social capital in promoting self-legitimacy would be even stronger in contexts in which there is less regularity in interactions between management or supervisors and frontline officers. One of the remarkable developments in policing over the last several decades is the use of technology. It has allowed police managers and supervisors to communicate to, and to access information (e.g., data on performance targets) from frontline officers without much warrant for recurrent face-to-face interactions. As Cain (1973) found in her detailed ethnographic work in England in the United Kingdom, low visibility and infrequent interactions with senior officers were the seedbed of trust and camaraderie among officers. It is thus the quality of relationships among these officers rather than the quality of interactions with “virtual supervisors” that might prove more crucial in promoting self-legitimacy among police officers.

Effectiveness In Crime Prevention

In the Leviathan, Hobbes argued that the raison d’eˆtre for the state and its agencies is the procurement of security and safety for citizens. This assertion of the foundational role of effectiveness to legitimacy is widely repeated by political theorists. Rothschild (1977: 488–489) puts it this way: a legal and political order, “though fully legitimate, is subject to erosion and delegitimation over the long run if it becomes chronically incompetent or ineffective” and continues that “no system stands still, forever legitimate, without being effective.” Criminologists have, of course, had long-standing recognition of the momentous influence of effectiveness in reducing crime, disorder, and fear on the moral standing of criminal justice agencies. For example, the appearance of effectiveness in crime prevention was a key mode of legitimation for Robert Peel’s “New Police” in Britain. More recently, survey-based studies have provided support for the effectiveness–legitimacy nexus, even if the effects of effectiveness are consistently found to be subservient to the role of procedural justice.

However, the focus of those studies has been on public views; it can be suggested that this can be extended to the question of the police’s self-legitimacy. It is reasonable to expect that positive assessments of levels of safety and security in their jurisdictions will increase or strengthen self-confidence in legitimacy, but negative assessments will undermine it by engendering disillusionment among officers as they begin to cast doubt on the moral validity of their continuous claims to the exclusive exercise of power. What moral self-justification is left for legal authorities if they appear overwhelmed by insecurity, the prevention of which constitutes the rationale of their authority? In his discussion of vigilantism in Nigeria, Harnischfeger (2003: 25) reports that not only did criminals operate with confidence and impunity but also “in most cases, [the police] would run away whenever and wherever they sighted them.” Anecdotal information from southeast Nigeria indicates that some officers even jettisoned the organization to join the vigilante groups that had emerged to fight the upsurge in crime. As Bauman has noted, such instances are expressive of a “tangible weakening, perplexity or sheepishness of power” (cited in Lewis 1984:15) and a diminution of the last strand of self-justification of the rightness of the authority vested in the police. Perceptions that they, or the police organization as a whole, are doing well in promoting neighborhood safety and security may therefore exert a strong influence upon a feeling self-legitimacy.

Police Misconduct

Previous studies have shown that police misconduct, including corruption, can undermine the external legitimacy of both political and legal institutions. It is therefore reasonable to argue that officers’ experiences and perceptions of misconduct within the police organization can also be important for the level of confidence they express in their own legitimacy. As Goldstein (1977: 199) argues, “[a]n officer who sees the processing of hundreds of petty offenders through a city’s minor courts cannot help but be struck by the futility of the procedure – the lack of justice, the lack of dignity, and the ineffectiveness of the criminal justice process [.. .].” Such cynicism can be detrimental to power-holder legitimacy in much the same way that public experiences and perceptions of corruption under perceived legitimacy of legal and political institutions.

Personal Characteristics

In his study in Ghana, Tankebe (2007) found that the personal characteristics of officers were largely unrelated to self-legitimacy. Only the rank of officers had a significant effect on confidence in self-legitimacy in Ghana; in particular, the results showed that corporals and sergeants expressed greater confidence in their legitimacy than did inspectors. It is important for future studies to examine more fully how self-legitimacy among officers differ by age, gender, rank, length of service, and ethnicity. In the countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States with ethnically diverse personnel, there is urgent need to test potential ethnic differences. This is against the backdrop of evidence suggesting that the experiences of ethnic minority officers within police forces in those countries have often been negative (Bland et al. 1999; Holdaway and Barron 1997).

Consequences Of Self-Legitimacy

Why should one take self-legitimacy seriously? What practical implications does it have for everyday police work? Again, on these important questions, we currently have almost no answers. Yet it is possible to speculate on a few potentially important consequences, which might be the subject of future empirical analysis. This section focuses, in particular, upon three consequences: use of deadly force, audience or external legitimacy, and organizational commitment.

First, self-legitimacy can help to explain why some officers are more prone to the use of deadly than others. According to Archer (2003: 139), people with different identities will “evaluate the same situations quite differently and their responses will vary accordingly.” If that is correct, it would seem reasonable to expect individual differences in officers’ beliefs about their self-legitimacy, as well as the social and institutional context, to influence how they perceive, evaluate, and respond to situations (Bottoms and Tankebe 2012). In Muir’s work, he found that unlike the “professional,” the “enforcer” was “more aggressive … more impatient and unenlightening, unresponsive to the possible changes going on inside the citizen’s head and heart” (1977: 145). Similarly, officers with differential self-legitimacy will lead to different uses of power and therefore differential quality of interactions with citizens, including the tendency to use (deadly) force. It has been hypothesized that a lack of confidence in self-legitimacy among officers can translate into indiscreet, impulsive, and unreflective handling of interactions with citizens. Bottoms and Tankebe (2012: 145) have therefore argued that, properly developed, self-legitimacy should result in “a critical self-awareness by police officers of the importance of the ways in which they view themselves and use power.”

The second possible consequence for self-legitimacy is its implication for the successful cultivation, maintenance, and reproduction of external or audience legitimacy. Unless officers are able to cultivate belief in the moral rightness of their own legitimacy, it might be difficult for them to convince others that they are entitled to the positions they occupy and the accompanying powers. Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) have recently argued that legitimacy is best conceptualized as involving a continuous dialogue between power-holders and audiences, with the former (e.g., police officers) making claims, the latter (e.g., citizens) responding, power-holders then perhaps adjusting their claims, and so on. If that is correct, then one might argue that the initiator of the dialogue has to be clear on its necessity, before she can convince others to participate.

Finally, organizational commitment has been defined as “the relative strength of the individual’s identification with, and involvement in, a particular organization, [.. .] characterized by three factors: (a) a strong sense of belief in, and acceptance of, the organization’s goals and values; (b) a readiness to exert effort on behalf of the organization; (c) a strong desire to remain a member of the organization” (Porter et al. 1974, p. 604). Although there are various studies that examine the correlates of organizational commitment, the role of self-legitimacy has so far not been sufficiently considered. An exception is Tankebe (2010) survey-based study, based on data from Ghana. In that study, the author found that self-legitimacy had an indirect influence upon organizational commitment.

Conclusion

Previous empirical analysis of police legitimacy had approached it from two standpoints. On the one hand, there are studies that focus on the perceptions of citizens regarding the moral rightness of police exercise of power. On the other hand are studies that examine the perceptions of law enforcement personnel on the legitimacy of their organizations. This research paper sought to draw attention to a third and complementary standpoint, namely, officers’ perceptions of their own individual legitimacy. This dimension of legitimacy has been described as self-legitimacy or power-holder legitimacy. This is in accordance with Holmes’ (1993: 39) contention that legitimacy “is not merely about mass/ popular attitudes toward a regime and/or system. Nor is it merely concerned with the beliefs of the leaders and/or the staffs. It is about all of these.” In focusing on this aspect of legitimacy, the object of this research paper has been to extend prior knowledge on the subject.

There have been only a handful of studies that have sought to understand, empirically, the conditions that create and sustain self-legitimacy; others have looked at the consequences of self-legitimacy (Muir 1977; Tankebe 2007, 2010). Although important in seeking to extend the boundaries of legitimacy result, these studies have their own limitations. There is therefore a need for more empirical studies that examine the various hypotheses discussed above. For example, there is the need for longitudinal studies that attempt to measure changes in the levels of self-legitimacy over time and the conditions that might be antecedent to stability and change in levels of self-legitimacy through time. Second, and as noted earlier, there are prior studies on employees’ perceptions of organizational legitimacy. These studies have identified procedural justice as consistent primary antecedent of perceived organizational legitimacy. To what extent might self-legitimacy relate to assessments of organizational legitimacy? There are presently no systematic attempts to address this question, but it might be worthy to investigate it because the answer can offer an additional pathway to enhance organizational legitimacy. Thirdly, might levels of self-legitimacy help to shed light on officers’ readiness to use force against citizens? To accomplish this will require an obvious need for methodological diversity since survey-based data alone cannot help satisfactorily to investigate these questions. It would be necessary for future tests to use data from systematic social observations (Mastrofski et al 1998) and interviews of the kind Rydberg and Terrill (2010) employed in their investigation of the effects of educational attainment on police behavior.

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