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Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy: A Test of Measurement and Structure

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Abstract

The procedural justice theory of police legitimacy has received substantial empirical support, yet too little attention has been paid to the operationalization and measurement of these important theoretical constructs. In particular, it is unclear whether the items used to represent procedural justice and police legitimacy possess convergent and discriminant validity. The current study uses confirmatory factor analysis to test for the measurement properties of these constructs and expands upon prior research by also including a measure of encounter-based procedural justice in addition to a scale tapping into global beliefs. The results provide mixed support for discriminant and convergent validity between legitimacy and global procedural justice. Full structural equation models test an alternative specification of one of the popular measurement methods for legitimacy, and compare the relative impact of each type of procedural justice. The findings indicate that while specific procedural justice predicts legitimacy, global procedural justice has a stronger influence. Implications for measurement and police policy are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Modification indices suggested that two of the trust scale items of legitimacy (“police are generally honest” and “most officers do their jobs well”) have their error terms freed to correlate; however, this was not done because these two items did not evince sufficient content overlap. It was decided that honesty and job performance were different aspects of the evaluation of police trustworthiness. The enhancement of model fit that would be produced by allowing these two error terms to correlate would be artificial and misleading.

  2. Only the factor loading ranges are displayed in the tables, as reporting all loadings for all models would consume excessive space. Full loading descriptions are available from the author upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Florida, Department of Criminal Justice, Orlando, FL, USA

    Jacinta M. Gau

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  1. Jacinta M. Gau
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Correspondence to Jacinta M. Gau.

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Gau, J.M. Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy: A Test of Measurement and Structure. Am J Crim Just 39, 187–205 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-013-9220-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-013-9220-8

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