Social context in police legitimacy: giving meaning to police/community contacts

The history of policing in the United States is a history of tension between the police and the public, especially in marginalised communities, where the legitimacy of the police and their interventions has been most questioned. Marginalised and often minority communities often complain about over and under policing, that is, policing that harasses local residents but does not address serious crime. In recent years, concerns with the institutional legitimacy of the police in the US and elsewhere have risen in public discussions and in scientific research. Current models of police legitimacy tend to focus on transactions between the police and the public over matters of procedural justice; however, taking a more contextual view of police interventions in communities provides opportunities to look beyond transactions and sort out the socio-cultural acceptance of the police against the myriad of services they provide to communities. Here we focus on census tracts in Boston, merging calls for service data with perceptual survey data. We find significant differences in the types of police services requested by advantaged and disadvantaged communities. Public-initiated calls for service are largely for emergency response matters as opposed to crime prevention and community restoration; police-initiated services, however, are more evenly distributed across prevention, response, and restoration. While residents of disadvantaged, high-crime communities request the police more often, they perceive themselves as unwilling to report crime. Additionally, they perceive their communities as unsafe while also viewing the police as less legitimate.