Nov 2, 2008 - Abstract. This paper reviews the British research literature on public trust and confidence in criminal justice. The review falls into three sections.
TRUST AND CONFIDENCE IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE: A REVIEW OF THE BRITISH RESEARCH LITERATURE1 Ben Bradford Jonathan Jackson Mike Hough Stephen Farrall2 November 2008
Abstract This paper reviews the British research literature on public trust and confidence in criminal justice. The review falls into three sections. The first section documents the ways in which trust, confidence and legitimacy have been defined and measured. The second section outlines (a) levels of public confidence and (b) trends and trajectories over the past few decades. The third examines the various explanations put forward for the roots and dynamics of public perceptions of criminal justice. In line with extant research in this area, the primary focus of the review is on the police.
1. What is ‘trust’ and ‘confidence’ in justice? Sociological work tends to portray trust as pervasive, inherent in and formative of many social situations, including both face-to-face encounters and the relationships between individuals and organisations, institutions or the state. Some theorists emphasise that trust reduces the complexity of the world by ‘bracketing out’ many possible events, freeing us up to act as if it was certain they were not going to occur (Luhmann, 1979). Trust therefore becomes necessary in situations of uncertainty and risk, particularly uncertainty regarding the motives, intentions and future actions of others on who we depend. Other work describes how, when placed, trust assumes that those who are trusted will in certain circumstances place one’s interests above their own (Barber, 1983). Since trust involves placing oneself or one’s interests, for whatever reason and in whatever way, at the mercy of individuals, groups or institutions (Tilly, 2005), it is embedded in our social relationships, and involves at its root tacit (or explicit) expectations that others will behave in predictable ways. Trust creates a world that is stable and coherent. Trust allows us to get on with our lives, and it is embedded in our relationships with others. So what does this mean for trust in justice? Well, if one trusts the criminal justice system then encounters with police officers, court officials and others will be assumed to proceed predictably according to the assumed role and function of the justice system. Police officers and other actors will act effectively and efficiently, with fairness and respect, ultimately representing the rule of law and the moral base of society. If we witnessed a crime we would act appropriately; if we were stopped by the police we would expect them to be, and would act as if they were, effective and fair. Such moment-to-moment acts of consent, compliance and cooperation on
1 This working paper was compiled as part of a European Commission 7th Framework Programme funded project
entitled JUSTIS: Scientific Indicators of Confidence in Justice. JUSTIS is co-ordinated by Kings College London and runs from March 2008 to February 2011. For more details, please see here: http://www.eurojustis.eu/ 2 The authors’ affiliations are, respectively, London School of Economics, London School of Economics, Kings College London and University of Sheffield.
1 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1303567
behalf of the individual also express moments of perceived legitimacy of the criminal justice system (and the rule of law more generally) (Beetham, 1991). In our view, therefore, trust in justice rests within the dynamic and situated nature of public encounters and cooperation with the police and the criminal justice system. Trust is stated – when we say that we would cooperate with the police and that we expect the police to behave in certain ways if we encountered them. Trust is also revealed – demonstrated by, and created out of, what we do and who we interact with. Challenged and revised through the specific dynamics of the encounter, in those moments of cooperation, compliance and deference, trust is created or undermined in situations where the individual is an actor, where they are actively involved in interactions with authorities and can make their own assessments of, for example, the fairness of police officer’s behaviours. In comparison to trust, confidence seems more of a ‘system-level’ institutionally-based attitude towards the activities of the criminal justice system. It is, we propose, something closer to a ‘job rating’ of the police and other agents of criminal justice. Sitting above actual encounters and specific moments of cooperation and compliance, confidence is a belief that the criminal justice as a set of institutions behaves effectively, fairly, and that it represents the interests and expresses the values of the community. While confidence may be a more stable evaluation than trust, it is of course subject to revision through experience. If confidence is rooted in understandings of the role and nature of criminal justice, and if confidence involves rather abstract assessments of the behaviour of the police organisation, it can be undermined by long term processes or events (such as the perceived decline in police visibility, which might represent a decline in availability and readiness to intervene, or increasingly widespread ideas that police do not treat everyone the same). Because it is based on and expressed by basic social understandings and assumptions, confidence may be relatively immune from short term change. But rather like an oil tanker, once a change of direction is underway it might be difficult to halt or reverse. A key element of all trust/confidence relationships involving the criminal justice system is assessments of the fairness with which the system operates. Within this we might distinguish between distributive fairness and procedural justice. Distributive fairness addresses public beliefs regarding the fairness with which services are distributed, whether the police provide help to all groups equally or whether, following interaction with the police, people typically get what they deserve. Discussing the US, Sarat (1977) argues that the demand for equal treatment is a core theme running through public evaluations of the police and courts. He suggests that the ‘…perception of unequal treatment is the single most important source of popular dissatisfaction with the American legal system. According to available survey evidence, Americans’ believe that the ideal of equal protection, which epitomizes what they find most valuable in their legal system, is betrayed by police, lawyers, judges, and other legal officials’ (p. 434). By contrast, procedural justice refers to perceptions of fairness related to the ways in which procedures, independent of their specific outcomes, are conducted. Tyler (1990; Lind and Tyler 1988) found that individuals’ concerns about fair process are far broader than a simple emphasis on self-interest (which an outcome-based model would privilege). People care about the type of authority exercising power as well as its motives for doing so, and they care about how they are treated and whether their rights are respected. These are issues unrelated to the substantive content of decisions made or the outcomes of a particular situation. Tyler (1990) also found that issues revolving around how people were treated were consistently more accurate predictors of perceptions of legitimacy than their judgments of the outcome of their interaction. If trust is something you do, and confidence is something you have, then trust is about the relationship between you and individual actors in the criminal justice (and about your behaviour and your experience) while confidence is about your assessment of the processes and activities of the criminal justice system at a much broader and personally remote level. Confidence involves attitudes towards effectiveness, fairness and perhaps also some kind of value alignment (the police understand the needs of our community and have ‘our interests’ at heart, although of course different people, in different contexts, may place more or less weight on each of these attitudes). In this distinction between trust and confidence, we follow the work Luhmann (1988). Luhmann holds that trust is active, based on assessments of risk that inherently involve choice, emerging out of encounters and interactions. By contrast, confidence is passive, directed at the justice system as an institution, reflecting how the system acts in general (not specifically to oneself). Trust stands for the more active and individually negotiated interactions with representatives of the criminal justice system: it is rooted in and tested by individual experiences and encounters, and in more concrete or low level assessments of the police organisation. More than confidence, trust is created or undermined in situations where the individual is an actor, where they are actively involved in interactions with police
2 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1303567
and can make their own assessments of, for example, the fairness of officer’s behaviours. Trust is immediate, changeable, and arguably more capricious: a single negative experience might severely damage trust in the fairness of the police while at the same time having much less impact on confidence (that the police are effective in dealing with serious crime, for example). In contrast to British research output on confidence and trust, legitimacy and criminal justice has received much less empirical attention. Legitimacy is a ‘psychological property of an authority, institution, or social arrangement that leads those connected to it to believe that it is appropriate, proper, and just’ (Tyler, 2006). In political philosophy, theories of legitimacy are often confined to a very specific set of social relationships: namely, those between individuals and institutions – such as the police – or even more overarching structures such as the state. The concept of legitimacy is generally bound up with the right to be recognised, to have remit over a certain area of life (Habermas, 1979), and to command and be obeyed (Weber, 1978; Tyler, 1990). Applied to the criminal justice system, the concept of legitimacy brings to the fore notions of power and authority. Some political philosophers some have followed a loosely Weberian tradition, which sees legitimacy as essentially the mask of raw power, as noted above others maintain that in as much as legitimacy is granted by the individual to the institution it must contain a normative element, a decision by the individual, whether conscious or not, that the institution shares a certain moral or ethical position (Beetham, 1991). Legitimacy is not just an excuse for power; it is a justification of that power. Judgements among individuals about the legitimacy of an institution must be based to some degree on assessments of the congruence between its goals, practises and behaviours and their own. Perhaps most routinely, legitimacy in seen in those specific moments of compliance with the law and cooperation with the justice system (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler & Huo, 2000). Here legitimacy overlaps conceptually with trust. But more broadly, legitimacy is about the moral justifiability of the power relations bound up in the state and its justice system; for example, conformity to people’s values, the ability to satisfy public interests and normative expectations, and the legality of police power. How has trust and confidence been measured in UK research? The British Crime Survey (BCS) is the main source of quantitative data on confidence in the criminal justice system. Trust and confidence has generally been measured in the BCS by survey questions of the type: ‘How good a job do you think the police/the police in this area are doing?’ Such a question has appeared in every sweep of the BCS since 1982, as well as in other surveys such as the 2000 Policing for London Survey (PfLS) and the Metropolitan Police’s Public Attitudes Survey (METPAS). Indeed the BCS now contains equivalent questions relating to other key parts of the criminal justice system – the Crown Prosecution Service, courts, prisons and so on. The questions used in the BCS (and the aspects of the criminal justice system and agencies they relate to) have changed considerably however, even if the good job/bad job questions have remained a benchmark comparative measure. Taking the police as an example, questions have developed from the simple “How good a job do the police in this area do?” in 1982, through the addition of a similar question about an abstract ‘police’ in 1996, to the current situation where these general opinions are augmented by the elicitation of more specific views, through the questions set out below. How much would you agree or disagree that… A. They (the police in this area) can be relied on to be there when you need them. B. They (the police in this area) would treat you with respect if you had contact with them for any reason. C. The police in this area treat everyone fairly regardless of who they are. D. They (the police in this area) can be relied on to deal with minor crimes. E. They (the police in this area) understand the issues that affect this community. F. They (the police in this area) are dealing with the things that matter to people in this community. G. Taking everything into account I have confidence in the police in this area. Answers on five point scales: strongly agree; tend to agree; neither agree or disagree; tend to disagree; strongly disagree. Source: British Crime Survey 2005/06 Final Questionnaire
Table 1 presents the findings from factor analysis of data arising from these measures (in the 2005/2006 BCS), showing good scaling properties for a one-factor solution. This suggests that these items measure one underlying construct, which we would term: ‘public confidence in police engagement and procedural justice.’
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Table 1 Factor analysis of measures of public confidence in police engagement and procedural justice They can be relied on to be there when you need them They would treat you with respect if you had contact with them for any reason They treat everyone fairly regardless of who they are They can be relied on to deal with minor crimes They understand the issues that affect this community They are dealing with the things that matter to people in this community Taking everything into account I have a lot of confidence in the police in this area Source: 2005/2006 BCS (non-victim form, including ethnic booster sample). n = 50,624. χ2 11810 df 14, p
