Understanding Willingness to Cooperate With Police: Current Perceptions of Bias Matter, But So Does Hope in Future Police Procedural Justice

Abstract

To solve crime, police rely on the public’s willingness to cooperate (WTC). While scholarship has focused on how people’s current perceptions of police might impact their WTC, it is likely that their views concerning the future might also matter. This study tested the hypothesis that people’s hope in future police procedural justice (HFPPJ) may impact and even overpower the association between how they currently view police and their current WTC. With two convenience samples, one of 311 adolescents and another of 578 adults, and two measurement strategies, the results indicated that, while people’s current perceptions of police are associated with their WTC, HFPPJ conditions moderate (study 1) and may even overpower (study 2) that association. Hope in the future of policing may not blind people to current biases within policing, but it appears to be associated with their willingness to cooperate with police.

Keywords:

• Procedural justice
• police bias
• group engagement model
• system justification theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Debates are still ongoing surrounding how, exactly, to define and operationalize legitimacy (Blount-Hill, 2020, Blount-Hill & Gau, 2022; Hamm et al., 2022).