Public Confidence on Policing: A Neo-Durkheimian Perspective

Citation

Min Park, S. (2007), "Public Confidence on Policing: A Neo-Durkheimian Perspective", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 30 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/pijpsm.2007.18130cae.001

Public Confidence on Policing: A Neo-Durkheimian Perspective

Public Confidence on Policing: A Neo-Durkheimian PerspectiveJonathan Jackson and Jason SunshineThe British Journal of Criminology2007Vol. 47No. 2pp. 214-224

TJackson and Sunshine (2007) investigate the core predictors of public confidence in policing on the basis of neo-Durkheimian perspective, which argues that the public perception of police is shaped by lay evaluations of community cohesion and moral consensus rather than by individual worries about falling victim to crime. In particular, the authors predict:

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  individuals are more satisfied with the police response not when they fear for their own safety, but when they believe that their community is morally deteriorating;

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  public satisfaction with the police is driven by individual judgments about whether the police embody community values and morals;

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  as identification with the community increases, the importance of identification with the police is expected to increase, and the importance of concerns about social cohesion will decrease; and

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  identification with the police will be associated with perceptions of procedural justice or the belief that the police treat people with respect, dignity, and fairness.

The authors also present the findings of previous research which revealed that “fear of crime” and “punitive attitude” of citizens are driven by concerns about the breakdown of social organization and moral norms.

A single-contact mail survey was conducted for the 5,906 residents that were randomly drawn from seven sets of towns and villages within a predominantly rural area in the North-East of England. A total of 1,023 completed questionnaires were received, leaving the response rate at 18.0 percent. The authors analyze these data with four structural equation models:

(1) “the instrumental model” states that environmental perceptions shape beliefs about crime and risk perceptions, which in turn shape worries about crime, and these worries finally decide the public perception of policing;

(2) “the neo-Durkheimian model: stage one” suggests that perceptions of crime and social cohesion play a bigger role in predicting public confidence in policing than worries about crime do;

(3) “the neo-Durkheimian model: stage two” adds two more neo-Durkheimian predictors: “the public identification of values and morals of police officers,” and “procedural justice”; and

(4) “the community identification model with interaction effects” tests the role of community identification.

While instrumental worries about personal safety is found to be significantly related to the public confidence in policing in the first model, the second structural model reveals this significant relationship is, in fact, spurious, and that feeling that one's local community lacks cohesion, social trust and informal social control is much more important in deciding public confidence in policing. Furthermore, the third structural model shows very strong predict power of “public judgment about fairness of policing” and “public identification of police values.” The fourth model also gives support to the hypothesis that as identification with the community increases, so does the importance of social identification, but the importance of concerns about social cohesion decreases in relation to the increase in community identification.

Jackson and Sunshine suggest that public confidence in policing is not decided by disorder or fear of crime, but is rooted in a particular form of social perception, which is associated with lay evaluations of social order, cohesion, trust, and moral consensus. The public look to the police to defend community values and moral structures when they believe these values and moral structures to be under threat, and they want the police to be strong representatives of their community. The authors also strongly suggest that this is achieved when officers treat the public fairly and with dignity. Due to the spatial limitation of this research, however, the authors are discreet in generalization of their findings to urban area, and recommend the future study incorporating the data from broader locations.