Jonathan Jackson

Procedural justice theory has rarely placed fear of the police at the centre of the legitimacy process. In Chile and São Paulo, Brazil, coercive policing and fear of the police are prominent features of police–citizen relations. Procedural justice signals recognition and inclusion, and in contexts where police coercion is common, fear is likely to shape how those signals are read. We develop a process-based account in which fear sits upstream of the fairness and effectiveness judgements through which legitimacy is formed and test it against survey data from Chile ( n = 5,361) and São Paulo ( n = 1,806). Structural equation models show that perceived coercive policing and observation of or exposure to police violence are associated with higher fear; fear is associated with lower procedural justice; and these appraisals are associated with weaker legitimacy – particularly, normative alignment. We make the case for incorporating fear of the police into the social-psychological analysis of legitimacy perceptions in Latin American contexts and outline how intergroup emotions theory can guide the next stage of that work.

Legal legitimacy is often understood as a collective basis for rule-following: people accept legal authority because they recognise it as acting in the name of a political community to which they belong. We develop an exploratory account of what happens when the institution most visibly enforcing the law becomes a focus of political division. The argument is that police legitimacy may be less closely connected to orientations towards legal rules among people who no longer regard the police as representative of a shared civic community. We bring two pieces of cross-sectional evidence to bear on this possibility. The main analysis uses a survey of US adults conducted three weeks after George Floyd’s murder in June 2020 (retained N = 1,465; analytic N = 1,347). Police legitimacy was strongly associated with a more categorical orientation towards legal rules, but this association was stronger among respondents aligned with the police and weaker among those aligned with Black Lives Matter. BLM identification also retained an independent association with a more conditional rule orientation, concentrated on grounds concerning unfair enforcement and lack of representation. Supplementary analysis of a separate US sample collected in December 2025 (N = 731) found that BLM-aligned and liberal respondents continued to identify as law-abiding Americans while being less likely to regard the police as representative of that civic identity. These findings offer preliminary evidence consistent with the proposed account, but do not establish its causal direction or mechanism. Direct tests require designs that measure legal legitimacy, police prototypicality and rule orientation together, ideally over time or under experimentally varied conditions.

Taser rollout rests on a two-part promise: control at a distance should replace close-contact force and reduce injury. Using 579,524 Metropolitan Police use-of-force reports from 2018–2021, we followed 6,767 officers around their first recorded Taser-trained status, which marked eligibility, not carriage. Taser became more prominent in their recorded force, while compliant and non-compliant handcuffing, baton use and several forms of restraint accounted for smaller shares of reports. Recorded subject and officer injury did not fall. The records showed selective tactical reorganisation without a corresponding improvement in the binary injury measures. Because the system that deploys Taser also shapes which encounters officers attend, how those encounters unfold and what is recorded, this pattern cannot be attributed to the technology alone.

Does political polarization over immigration enforcement reflect disagreement about civic ideals—due process, equal treatment, and limits on state power—or disagreement about who deserves them? Scope of justice theory posits that abstract ideals constrain concrete judgments primarily when targets fall inside one’s moral community. In a probability-based United States sample (N = 1,386, with oversamples of Hispanic and MAGA-identifying respondents), Democrats and Republicans endorsed civic ideals at similarly high levels yet applied them selectively. Among respondents who morally included undocumented immigrants, civic ideals were associated with more critical evaluations of ICE and greater anger toward enforcement. Among those with exclusive moral boundaries, civic ideals showed weak or null associations with enforcement judgments. Moral inclusion and perceived procedural justice were jointly associated with substantial attenuation of partisan gaps in legitimacy judgments of both ICE and local police. Polarization reflects selective application of shared principles rooted in disagreement over moral standing.

We examine the psychological foundations of public support for vigilantism in South Africa. According to system justification theory, people are motivated to defend and legitimise the status quo, especially when they are psychologically or materially dependent on it. System-justifying individuals uphold the state’s authority in part by recognising the legitimacy of institutions to resolve conflict and impose legal punishment. Logically, people who justify the system should oppose vigilante violence because it threatens the state’s monopoly on legitimate force. Yet, does this hold in South Africa, a context in which crime is politicised and foreignness is frequently framed as a societal threat? Using nationally representative survey data, we show that system justification is positively associated with support for vigilantism against criminals, and that this association is stronger among respondents who report prior participation in anti-immigrant violence. Our findings complicate the standard view of system justification as inherently stabilising: they suggest that when perceived threats are symbolically tied to outsiders, defending “the system” may involve endorsing exclusionary rather than restraining violence.

This article presents a cross‐national test of the portability of procedural justice theory (PJT). Drawing on nationally representative survey data from 30 diverse social, political, and legal contexts across Europe and beyond, we find that the theory travels well across national borders and that its psychological purchase is particularly pronounced in societies where fair policing is considered the norm. First, in most countries, a normative account of public cooperation with the police—grounded in procedural justice and legitimacy—has greater empirical traction than an instrumental account based on effectiveness and fear of crime. Second, although procedural justice consistently emerges as the strongest predictor of police legitimacy, it is especially important in contexts where the police are widely viewed as fair and inclusive authorities—a proxy for their status as a positive group authority. These findings help lay the groundwork for cross‐national extensions of PJT, pointing to the need for further research into the social and institutional conditions that shape its psychological impact.

Adolescents’ perceptions of police legitimacy are central to the effective functioning of the legal system. When young people see the police as trustworthy and legitimate, they are more likely to regulate their own behavior, reducing reliance on coercion, deterrence and intrusive enforcement. This study examines whether police officers can cultivate such legitimacy through educational engagement in school classrooms. We conducted a three-wave cluster-randomized controlled trial across 81 English schools, where police officers delivered lessons on drugs and the law to students aged 13–15. Grounded in procedural justice and legal socialization theory, the intervention sought to model respectful, bounded authority in a classroom setting. Employing three complementary analytic strategies—a standard RCT, block-randomized design, and longitudinal panel analysis—we found robust evidence that police-led lessons enhanced students' perceptions of police fairness and deepened their understanding of legal concepts, including 'intent to supply'. These improvements persisted for at least ten weeks post-intervention and remained consistent across demographic subgroups. While we observed positive trends in legitimacy perceptions and willingness to cooperate with police, these effects were more modest and variable. We conclude with the idea that procedurally just engagement in the classroom can help socialize adolescents into a consensual rather than coercive relationship with police, though building institutional legitimacy may require sustained interaction beyond single educational encounters.

Procedural justice theory has rarely placed fear of the police at the centre of the legitimacy process. In Chile and São Paulo, Brazil, coercive policing and fear of the police are prominent features of police–citizen relations. Procedural justice signals recognition and inclusion, and in contexts where police coercion is common, fear is likely to shape how those signals are read. We develop a process-based account in which fear sits upstream of the fairness and effectiveness judgements through which legitimacy is formed, and test it against survey data from Chile (n = 5,361) and São Paulo (n = 1,806). Structural Equation Models show that perceived coercive policing and observation of or exposure to police violence are associated with higher fear; fear is associated with lower procedural justice; and these appraisals are associated with weaker legitimacy—particularly, normative alignment. We make the case for incorporating fear of the police into the social-psychological analysis of legitimacy perceptions in Latin American contexts, and outline how intergroup emotions theory can guide the next stage of that work.

Objectives: To test whether trust in the police (a) improves the online crime-reporting experience and (b) increases support for digital reporting. To examine whether a procedurally just follow-up email and primed motivations enhance or amplify these effects. Methods: In a 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 factorial experiment, 638 UK participants reported a hypothetical crime online. Experimental conditions: trust prime, reporting motivation, follow-up communication and crime type. Outcomes: user experience (fair and efficient) and support for online reporting. Results: Most participants felt the experience was fair and efficient. Support for online reporting was generally high. The trust prime improved both user experience and support. A procedurally-just follow-up email increased support but did not interact with trust. Motivation and crime type had no measurable effects. Conclusions: Systems that engage trust help users interpret impersonal processes as procedurally fair and efficient. Lacking such cues, online reporting risks being a hollow transaction—undermining police legitimacy.

Do people who see themselves invulnerable to crime suffer more from victimization? The psychological toll of victimization varies across people, but little is known about how pre-existing vulnerability perceptions shape the impact. Drawing on German two-wave panel data from 2,932 adults (2020–2021), we estimate the effect of violent victimization on subjective well-being across varying levels of perceived vulnerability. We combine Energy balance weighting, panel regressions with lagged outcomes and g-computation to detect heterogeneous effects. Four key findings emerge. First, on average, victimization’s impact on subjective well-being is modest across most vulnerability profiles. Second, people who saw themselves as least at risk experience the sharpest declines in well-being after being victimized. Third, causal identification is most fragile among individuals with high perceived vulnerability, where pre-treatment imbalances persist. Finally, vulnerability beliefs are grounded in real exposure to risk—shaped by earlier victimization and adverse social conditions. These findings suggest that the emotional fallout of crime depends not only on what happens, but on who it happens to—and what they believed before it did. When victimization catches people off guard, it hits harder. Recognising these psychological fault lines can help move victim support services from generic response to targeted support.