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This chapter seeks to illuminate the interconnectedness of procedural justice, use of force, and occupational culture in relation to police legitimacy.

The authors review the existing literature and offer an integrated methodological approach that would better assist researchers in their quest to enhance police legitimacy.

Using a systematic design that assesses police legitimacy from a variety of sources has the potential to help answer critical questions with regard to improving police practice.

This is a novel study approach, which has yet to be implemented but which may offer great insight with respect to improving police legitimacy.

This article examines how contact with the police led to the death of Michael Brown (an unarmed 18-year-old Black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, who was shot and killed during an altercation with a police officer). And, how Darren Wilson (the White police officer from the Ferguson Police Department who shot and killed Michael Brown) was portrayed in mainstream newspaper articles covering the story of Brown’s death.

Using both frame analysis and Hall’s framework of discursive domains for organizing and making sense of events in social life, we analyzed news coverage of Brown in three of the top circulating daily newspapers in the US: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. The Lexis Nexis database was used to retrieve a set of newspapers using the search term “Michael Brown.” Articles from the three leading newspapers were collected from the day the event occurred, August 9, 2014, through the end of the year, December 31, 2014.

The news articles used in this study were mostly written with an episodic frame. The articles presenting the socioeconomic background of Brown and Wilson were described as profiles on each individual and the neighborhood they came from, rather than a discussion about where they fell on the economic structure of this country and the larger, upstream forces that might influence those positions. The feelings and attitudes of the reader are also likely to be influenced by details included in the articles and how they were presented.

The findings contribute to the broader literature looking at the relationships between police and Black communities. Public health can play a role in advocating and facilitating programs that build better linkages between police and community. The public health field can take a leadership role in holding the news media accountable when they are engaging in frenetic inaction. Only by having difficult and challenging conversations that examines the upstream causes of violence and deaths like Brown’s, can we make progress in preventing them.

Purpose: For contemporary policing, the police–public communication process is one of the most essential elements of law enforcement management. The promotion of police–public relations, police integrity, and police accountability all depend upon effective communication. While ever a challenge for law enforcement agencies, the coming of the COVID-19 pandemic changed substantially the character of both mediated and interpersonal communication between the police and those policed as of 2020.

Methodology/Approach: Building upon the concept of electronic community-oriented policing (E-COP), this chapter proposes an expanded theoretical model of police–public online communication during a time in which in-person contacts are constrained and various forms of mediated communication assume major importance.

Findings: Using a sample of COVID-related police Facebook posts collected between February 1 and May 31, 2020, this chapter illustrates how the expanded E-COP model is helpful in orchestrating an effective police response to a major public health emergency. It also advances the argument that police–public online communication will be not only become widely used during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but will likely become routinized.

Originality/Value: The proposed model also provides practical suggestions for law enforcement agency leaders who endeavor to advance the goals of community-oriented and guardianship-directed policing. Some likely barriers to more effective use of social media are singled out for special attention.

Throughout the world the police have undergone considerable criticism for a lack of transparency and accountability. Many police agencies across the world have been grappling with how to improve transparency and accountability, as well as public acceptance of the police, most especially in minority and immigrant communities, which are the places where aggressive police tactics are often most visible.

This chapter considers policing in Boston, United States, and Bordeaux, France, framed by a three-part medical intervention model. The central thesis here is that in their quest to shed their other social support roles or in undercounting and undervaluing such efforts the police lose an opportunity to reframe the police legitimacy discussion. While issues of police legitimacy have been predominantly framed as fair treatment at the point of being stopped, admonished, arrested, or detained, much of what the police do to actually support communities is not much accounted for in the present legitimacy discourse.

Our preliminary findings suggest that public contact with the police goes well beyond issues of crime. Individuals and communities use the police for preventing harm, responding to a wide array of needs and for mitigating harm and fear, all of which help frame public opinion toward the police and hence shape the level of legitimacy accorded the police.

Analysis of police data from Boston and impressions from a developing effort in Bordeaux consider how the police are organized and what they do in these very different cultures, thereby broadening the conception and measurement of police efforts that support or detract from legitimacy.

Previous research on community attitudes toward the police focuses on suspect race as an important predictor of attitudes toward law enforcement and police use of force. Generally, missing from these studies, however, is the role of mental illness, both independently and in conjunction with race, and its effect on perceptions of police. This chapter summarizes our recent research addressing two issues: (1) how race and mental illness of suspects affect perceptions of the appropriateness of police use of force, and (2) how race and mental illness of citizens affect perceptions of police.

We examine these issues by summarizing research obtained through The Portland Race and Mental Illness Project (PRMIP), a survey administered to residents of Portland, Oregon. For our first topic, we use an experimental vignette that randomly alters race and mental health status of suspects. For our second topic, we ask respondents to self-report race, mental health status, and perceptions of the police.

Our dual focus provides two key findings: first, citizens’ perceptions of police use of force are affected by suspect race and mental health status. Second, like Black citizens, citizens with mental illness also have a negative impression of law enforcement.

Our research builds on research indicating racial disparity in trust in police by showing that mental illness – both that of the respondent and that of a suspect – affects attitudes toward the police. These results suggest that mental health status affects attitudes toward law enforcement and should be considered in future research and public policy.

This chapter examines how citizen journalism affects perceptions of legitimacy among local residents and police officers.

Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with residents and police officers.

Local residents are mostly willing to obey police commands, but a lack of trust in the police and fear of retaliation hinder willingness to cooperate with the police. Citizens’ willingness to follow police orders is mostly a way for them to end the encounter as quickly as possible so the contact will not extend for a prolonged period of time and cause even more serious consequences. Citizens have recorded the police in the past when they witnessed officers not following proper procedures. The police view citizens recording them as a form of defiance and while this makes policing challenging, police officers interviewed still hold high levels of self-legitimacy, most likely due to their organizational and occupational culture. Recording the police has emerged as a way for citizens to challenge police authority and legitimacy during encounters.

While recording the police has increased with recent technological advances, little empirical research has examined its impact on policing and police-community relations. This study connects three critical issues in policing – technology, citizen journalism, and police legitimacy – by assessing the impact of recording the police on police legitimacy in the eyes of the public and police officers. Not only does this study fill our gap in knowledge on citizens recording the police, but it also furnishes valuable implications for policy and future study.

Using archival data from the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri and current data from Fatal Encounters (FE), this study descriptively compared concentrated incidents of fatal police shootings of civilians in St. Louis, Missouri at two points in time – 1970 to 1980 and 2000 to 2010. This study also explored connections to race and income by mapping the composition of Black residents and levels of concentrated economic disadvantage using 1980 and 2010 United States Census data. Geographic Information Systems (GISs) results revealed noticeable similarities in the sites of fatal police shootings of civilians across the two time periods. Specifically, most of the incidents occurred in the northern and southeastern sectors of St. Louis City in neighborhoods with a higher number of Black residents and impacted by economic disadvantage. All of the individuals shot and killed by the police were male, and a majority were 22 years old or younger, and armed during the incident. Results from police perceptions studies from the 1970s and early to mid oughts are also discussed to posit that a persistence of police violence historically and presently may help offer key insights into how legal estrangement may ensue.

This chapter is set within global public sector reform processes, as policing is part of public service delivery. It explores the question of who is “vulnerable”, how vulnerability is assessed, and why? It considers the measurement of vulnerability, and how this influences policing practice and the role of the Police in contemporary policing.

The research is qualitative in nature and reliant on interview and documentary source data. It draws on concepts such as resilience, co-production, professionalisation and training as organising themes in which to make sense of how we reimagine the management of Vulnerability and the demands they place at the “core, the heart and the centre” of policing today.

Police management in the UK are attempting to stay true to the Peelian Principle of police efficiency alongside balancing the changing remit of what they have to contend with on a day-to-day basis – this is the paradox. Both Vulnerability and Risk are demonstrated to be increasingly interconnected alongside the developments of public health policing in the UK and elsewhere. Collectively, these concepts help to examine an increasingly complex landscape for the police to manoeuvre within, as they respond to a myriad of competing demands on services.

Vulnerability is the core, the heart and the centre of meaningful human experiences. With increasing pressures on resources, political scrutiny and changing roles and responsibilities, the police as an organisation (both in the UK and internationally) are increasingly responding to competing demands for their service. These demands are represented in this chapter as a paradox of change.

Purpose – This is a comparison of the role of the police in the enforcement of immigration law in the interiors of three nations: Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Methodology – The study builds upon research the authors have already done as well as desk research on recent developments. It uses three dimensions of the problem to focus the report: the hardware, software, and culture of police involvement in this issue.

Findings – In Germany, the local police are responsible for the enforcement of immigration control and have relatively fast and reliable means to identify undocumented immigrants. This is not the case in the United Kingdom and the United States, but there are trends toward more local police involvement, both by institutional cooperation and by the development of better databases and documents for faster identification. These trends are highly controversial in an environment that values community relations and is highly sensitive to racial profiling. However, there are also indications that the differences in typical police work such as traffic controls and crime investigation may not be as pronounced as the differences between the countries would suggest.

Research implications – This study highlights the need for ethnographic work with the police and with unauthorized immigrants to empirically describe and assess the role that the police are playing and its impact on police–community relations.

Practical implications – The German experience supports the value of a comprehensive information system for rapidly determining the immigration status of suspects, but it may not work as expected in the United States and the United Kingdom, where registration and identification obligations apply to foreign citizens only. With the US and UK experiences, one could predict that discriminating identification practices may become more sensitive issues in a Germany with increasing numbers of immigrated citizens.