Trust in the Law: Encouraging Public Cooperation with the Police and Courts (review)

This text seeks to explain why people willingly comply with legal authorities. One means by which compliance might be accomplished is through the threat of sanctions that would accompany noncompliance. This deterrence approach, the authors suggest, is less optimal than having people assent without coercion. Their central thesis is that such willingness to comply critically depends upon a strong sense that legal authorities are legitimate. This sense of legitimacy, in turn, relies upon the beliefs that justice officials follow a set of fair procedures and that they do so in a predictable and trustworthy fashion.

Tyler and Huo, social psychologists, use telephone surveys of 1,656 residents of the California cities of Oakland and Los Angeles to demonstrate that this "process-based model of regulation" assists significantly in predicting people's willingness to comply with authorities. Their analysis of the interviews shows that citizens who encounter police officers or judges assess those not on the outcomes that resulted, but on the process that produced those outcomes. They argue that two aspects of that process are critical. One is the citizen's assessment of the fairness of the procedures used, the second the assessment of the motives of the officials who employed those procedures. When people believed that procedures are fairly administered, and that officials are trustworthy, they saw justice as legitimately delivered, regardless of the outcome. As a consequence, their willingness to comply increases, despite any possible negative impacts.

The authors oversampled minorities, because they recognized that the justice system possesses less legitimacy in communities of color. Tyler and Huo were thus understandably interested in learning whether race exerts an independent effect on assessments of legitimate encounters with justice officials. Their analysis suggests that such an independent effect does not exist; the critical issue remains assessments of fairness and trustworthiness.

This set of findings, the authors assert, is cause for optimism for justice officials. Even though minority citizens in the U.S. are more likely to experience negative outcomes at the hands of police and judges, this does not mean that building legitimacy in those communities is impossible. All that matters is the process. Thus, they argue, "If police officers or judges want to increase the willing acceptance of their decision and voluntary deference to their authority . . . as well as receive more favorable evaluations of their own performance, they can most effectively do so by focusing on how well they treat [minorities] in their interactions." Not surprisingly, they conclude their analysis with recommendations for changes in police training, so that officers learn to approach citizens with greater respect, and learn to delay the use of strong-armed tactics until absolutely necessary.

These findings are not without consequence, and one can understand the authors' optimism. However, there are limitations to these data. What is missing is any sense of the social context in which these encounters play out. If minorities assess encounters with the police with more consistent negativity than nonminorities, is this strictly a matter of the nature of those encounters? Are not other matters, related to structural disadvantage and preexisting ideologies of opposition to the police, also critical? To be fair, the authors acknowledge this point, but only in passing.

Similarly, the police are treated as something of a black box, not a social organization with an entrenched set of cultural dynamics that are resistant to change. Most significantly, the paramount value of safety drives officers to engage in the very aggressive practices Tyler and Huo want to see changed. Diminishing this stress on safety will be no easy task.

In short, this text displays both the strengths and weaknesses of social psychological work that relies upon telephone interviews. The analysis reveals findings of considerable consequence, but the social dynamics of justice need more attention. A more concretely sociological analysis is necessary to make more complete...