title: Variable links within perceived police legitimacy?: fairness and effectiveness across races and places.
abstract: This work examines connections between two threads of community residents' perceptions of local police legitimacy, effectiveness and procedural fairness, and how those links depend on race, place, and race/place combinations. Previous works have connected these two threads, but have failed (a) to explore the variability of that connection by race, place, and race/place combinations across communities spanning the urban to suburban to rural continuum or (b) to model mutual influence. An extension of the group position thesis and work on minority views of police practices suggest how these variations might be patterned. Data were derived from a 2003 probability-based sampling survey of household respondents across Pennsylvania (n=1289). Generalized confirmatory factor analysis models built procedural fairness and effectiveness indices for four groups: whites in urban core counties, non-whites in urban core counties, whites in non-urban core counties, and non-whites in non-urban core counties. Non-recursive structural equation models revealed variable impacts of perceived police effectiveness on perceived police fairness and, to a lesser extent, of fairness on effectiveness. Implications for a more structurally and contextually aware understanding of links in police legitimacy models are developed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, United States.
authors.forename: Ralph B
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, La Salle University, United States. Electronic address: wyant@lasalle.edu.
authors.forename: Brian R
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Wyant
authors.affiliation: Department of Criminal Justice, Monmouth University, United States.
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lockwood
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D005191:Family Characteristics; D006801:Humans; D035846:Law Enforcement; D008913:Minority Groups; D010414:Pennsylvania; D016495:Police; D044469:Racial Groups; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D012935:Social Justice; D014505:Urban Population; D044465:White People
keywords: Effectiveness; Police; Police legitimacy; Procedural justice; Race; Urban