The Link Between Communicative Intelligence and Procedural Justice: The Path to Police Legitimacy

Introduction

As a society there are social norms that prescribe process and outcome and when these are violated, we object (Tyler, 1990). When dealing with the criminal justice system, citizens encounter processes when interacting with officer. That encounter defines a citizen’s sense of procedural justice. Tyler (1990) asserts that “the justice of the procedures through which outcomes are distributed and decisions made” is procedural justice. The outcomes and decisions made influence the public’s perception of police legitimacy (Mazerolle, Sargeant, Cherney, Bennett, Murphy, Antrobus, & Martin, 2014) Police legitimacy is the belief that police are a legitimate authority that the public will defer to and obey (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003b). Police legitimacy allows society to function smoothly. The authors assert that during this encounter, the citizen’s experience with the officer defines the level of procedural justice, which in turn, creates the degree of police legitimacy.

America was founded on a citizen’s right to procedural due process in regards to “life, liberty, or property”. This belief was well founded in common law even before the constitution codified it in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments (Orth, 2003). These Amendments ensure fair treatment of an offender when charged with a legal violation. There are three essential features of due process: adequate notice, a fair hearing, and judgment based on evidence (Fogler, Konovsky, & Cropanzano, 1992). Citizens contacted by police officers over a potential violation are at the mercy of the police that they have a fair hearing and a judgment based on unbiased evidence. Officers collect evidence at the scene of the crime, take eyewitness testimony, and often provide testimony themselves. If citizens view the officer as incapable or unwilling to conduct the investigation in fair and equitable manner the citizen will view the encounter as a violation of their procedural due process or procedural justice. By definition, policing is procedural justice. The police make the initial decisions about which procedures and outcomes are distributed to the public (Tyler, 1990). All police/citizen contacts involve procedure and outcomes so every police contact will involve a modicum of procedural justice.

Enforcing the law is one of the fundamental duties of a police officer. To do this an officer must make contact with a citizen and communicate the violation that has occurred. And although they have discretion in their enforcement, often they are required to make arrests or administer citations due to policy or legal concerns. There are four aspects of the police contact that affects a citizen’s view: active participation in the decision-making, the decision-making is neutral and objective, trustworthy motives by the officer, and being treated with dignity and respect (Tyler, 2004). “Quality of treatment” and the “quality of decision making process” are the two overarching themes by which the public judges the officer’s interaction (Reisig et al., 2007, p.1006). Whether the outcome for the citizen was positive or negative, it is the treatment by the officer that had an effect on the citizen’s satisfaction with the police (Tyler, 1990). It is the treatment received by the citizen from the officer that shapes the citizen’s perception of police legitimacy. Legitimacy according to Tyler (1990) is “a quality possessed by an authority, a law, or an institution that leads others to feel obligated to obey its decision and directives”.