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Chapter 13. General Views About the Law and the Legal System
- Russell Sage Foundation
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Chapter 13 General Views About the Law and the Legal System JUST AS it is often assumed that the outcomes that people receive when they deal with specific police officers and judges shape their reactions to those encounters, it is oftenbelieved that instrumental issues, such as the cost of going to court, court delays, or police performance in fighting crime, dominate the overall evaluations of legal institutions that are measured in public opinion polls. Iftrue, this has important implications for the political viability of a process-based strategy. It suggests that the police and the courts face strong public opposition to the implementation of a fairness-based modet which might be perceived as weak on crime control or unrelated to the "real" issues of cost and delay in courts. (For a more detailed presentation of the findings presented in this chapter , see Tyler 2001£.) In the case of the courts, a variety of instrumental concerns havebeen put forward in critiques of their operation. When people are litigants in civil court, they are believed to be unhappy about the costs of going to court and about the delays in getting their cases resolved (Tyler 1988, 1989, 1997a, 1998). Evaluations of criminal courts, primarily on the part of victims and their families, stress the nature of the decisions and the sentences imposed. According to these evaluations, too many guilty people go free and those who are convicted often receive sentences that are too lenient. With evaluations of the police, a key instrumental focus is the ability of the police to fight crime. Police effectiveness in combating crime is a key concernnot only of suburbanresidents, who fear the spread ofcrime, but of inner-city residents, who are the primary victims of crime. Surveys have shown that both groups of citizens, for their own reasons, strongly support those police actions that lower the level of crime. Here we argue that, in contrast to what is often believed, public confidence in the police and the courts is not strongly linked to judgments 178 Trust in the Law about cost, delay, and performance. On the contrary, people's primary concerns on this general level are very similar to their concerns on a personallevel . The issues that people care about most deeply when considering the police and the courts are whether these authorities treat people fairly, recognize citizen rights, treat people with dignity, and care about people's concerns. In other words, evaluations of the quality of the police and the courts are a reaction to views about how legal authorities deal with community residents. These findings are true of all community members, regardless of whether they are white or minority group members, and regardless of whether they live in a low- or highcrime area. If true, this view of the public'S concerns implies that a process-based model of regulation could be effective, since it would address the concerns found in general public evaluations of the police and the courts. However, we must ask an important question: To what degree would both minority and white respondents support the police and the courts as institutions because they treat people fairly? To answer this question we examined the ability of legal authorities to create and support the confidence ofthe general public through the perception of fairness in the behavior of those authorities. Survey research data allowed us to examine the basis of public confidence in, and public support for, legal authorities. Such judgments are made by all respondents and influence their political support for the policeand the courts. We examined the basis ofsuchpublic supportusing four studies of general public evaluations of the police and the courts: the Chicago study, the 1997 Oakland study, the Hearst national survey, and a study conducted by the National Center for State Courts. The Chicago Study First, we considered the results of the study of Chicago residents described in earlier chapters (Tyler 1990). In that study a random sample of 1,575 respondents were interviewed about their confidence in and support for the Chicago police and courts. Three aspects of public views were explored: confidence, obligation, and help-seeking. Confidence reflected people's general evaluations of the quality of police and court performance. Obligation reflected the general willingness to accept legal rules and decisions. Help-seeking reflected the degree to which people indicated that they would bring relevant problems to the attention of the authorities. In this study confidence was assessed using a ten-item scale. People were asked to indicate how...