Trust in the police and police legitimacy through the eyes of teenagers

Abstract

Procedural justice theory has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of policing (Hough, Jackson, & Bradford, 2013; Hough, Jackson, Bradford, Myhill, & Quinton, 2010; Tyler, 1990, 2004, 2006, 2011), but research and theorizing have focussed almost exclusively on policing adults (some exceptions are Fagan & Tyler, 2005; Hinds, 2007, 2009; Murphy, 2015; Oberwittler & Roché, 2018; Reisig & Lloyd, 2009). Those in late adolescence and early adulthood are, however, a critically important age group for policing and constitute a key “customer group”. Crucially, it is during this period that young people undergo what is probably the most relevant phases of legal socialization in terms of developing their attitudes and orientations towards the police (Fagan & Tyler, 2005; Piquero, Fagan, Mulvey, Steinberg, & Odgers, 2005). We also know that offending careers generally start in the early teens (Jennings, Loeber, Pardini, Piquero, & Farrington, 2016, p. 7). Because of this, in the third wave of the ISRD project, a small amount of questionnaire space was devoted to the procedural justice theory (see Box 7.1). Also taking into account criticism of proactive stop and search policies (or stop-and-frisk in American English) in the United Kingdom (Murray, 2014; Scott, 2015; StopWatch, 2017) and the impact on teenagers (Flacks, 2017; Reid Howie Associates, 2002), an additional set of questions on stop and search encounters was included in the England and Scotland questionnaire.