Vol. 13 No. 3 (March 2003)

TRUST IN THE LAW:  ENCOURAGING PUBLIC COOPERATION WITH THE POLICE AND COURT, by Tom R. Tyler and Yuen J. Huo.  New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002.  239pp.  Hardcover $32.95.  ISBN: 0-87154-889-5.

Reviewed by Edie Greene, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, email: egreene@uccs.edu . 

On Saturday, February 15, 2003, people gathered in 603 communities around the world to protest the impending war in Iraq.  Some of these demonstrations, staged as part of the International Day of Protest, attracted crowds in excess of 1 million.  In 601 cities, the protests were relatively peaceful and the police, although present, were non-confrontational.  But in two cities—Athens, Greece and Colorado Springs, Colorado—police used tear gas to disperse unruly crowds.  Approximately 50,000 demonstrators had gathered in Athens and some of them had thrown stones and gasoline bombs at riot police.  In my own community, Colorado Springs, the situation was decidedly different, yet police tactics were the same. 

The crowd that gathered a few miles from my home was estimated at 3,000-4,000.  After a small group of protestors blocked traffic on a major artery and ignored demands to clear the street, riot police with shields and helmets marched shoulder-to-shoulder along the protest route, preventing marchers from continuing their progress.  Shortly thereafter, tear gas was deployed and more than a dozen people were dragged off to waiting police cars. 

In an emergency meeting of the City Council a few days after the march, the Colorado Springs police chief was called upon to defend the actions of his officers.  He maintained that the degree of force used by the police was directly correlated with the degree of noncompliance by the protestors.  But many citizens disagreed, and letters to the editor in local newspapers provided scathing accounts of police over-reaction and, more generally, a lack of trust in the actions of our men and women in blue.  A representative letter:

 “I do not contest the right of the police to use force when facing a reasonable threat.  If the protest had turned violent, the use of tear gas and other nonlethal weapons would have been warranted.  Instead, what I witnessed was a group of people standing on a sidewalk.  A handful of people who did not listen when ordered to get off the street had been arrested.  The others stood by, out of the way of traffic, holding their signs and chanting.  And then a funny thing happened.  Officers in riot gear used tear gas to disperse the crowd...It doesn’t take a physicist like me to figure out that this is not a very good strategy if you want people to vacate the area...The entire CSPD should be ashamed.  They were cowards today, using weapons against a peaceful gathering of people, the very ones they are supposed to serve and protect” (Nicholas C. Plumb, Letter to the Editor, COLORADO SPRINGS INDEPENDENT, 2/20/03).

According to Tom Tyler and Yuen Huo, authors of TRUST IN THE LAW, police officers in my community were operating under a model of social control or deterrence, the dominant way of thinking about how to manage encounters between police and an unruly citizenry.  In this model, police use threats or arrests (or, in this case, a noxious substance) to gain compliance with their demands.  Judges have similar mechanisms of coercion at their disposal:  the imposition of fines and prison sentences.  According to the deterrence model, the threat of application of these sanctions pressures people to obey the law and to abide by a judge’s orders.

The main question posed in this book is whether there might be a better way for legal authorities to attempt to gain acceptance of their directives and compliance with their wishes.  Indeed, police officers and judges are not likely to generate warm feelings in the community when they give people less than what they want or feel they deserve or when they limit people’s abilities to act as they wish.  In fact, I suspect that a significant portion of the populace in Colorado Springs is more distrustful of the police than they were prior to February 15, 2003.  So what other ways can legal authorities shape public behavior in order to encourage deference to the law?

Tyler and Huo suggest that a process based model of regulation is more likely to encourage voluntary acceptance of the decisions of police officers and judges.  This model posits that members of the public will defer more willingly to the decisions of cops and courts when they believe that these individuals are using fair procedures in exercising their authority and when they feel that the motives of cops and courts are trustworthy.  In short, when people feel that they are in a cooperative relationship with authorities, they will consent to the decisions of these authorities.

To reach this conclusion, Tyler and Huo explored the role of procedural justice, trust, and outcome favorability in shaping deference to directives of police officers and judges.  Their description of that empirical study forms the central core of this book.  The study, conducted in 1998, involved interviews of 1656 individuals in Oakland and Los Angeles, who were chosen because they indicated to an initial interviewer that they had at least one recent experience with a police officer or a judge.  The authors attempted to oversample members of minority groups and ended with approximately equal number of whites, African Americans, and Hispanics as participants in their study.

The researchers asked interviewees to assess the fairness of the outcomes of those encounters with authorities as well as the fairness of the procedures that were used to achieve those outcomes.  They also measured people’s trust in the motives of a particular authority figure by asking participants whether they felt that their views had been considered, they could trust the authority, the authority tried to do the right thing, and the authority cared about their concerns.

As one might expect, the favorability of the outcomes that participants received shaped their responses to this encounter.  (It stands to reason that we feel better about situations and people to whom we relate when we get what we want from those situations and from those individuals.)  But importantly, the willingness to accept the decision of a police officer or judge was strongly influenced by perceptions of procedural fairness and trustworthiness.  In short, when people perceive that police officers and judges are treating them fairly and when they trust the motives of these authorities, they are more likely to accept directives of those authorities.

In the second half of the book, the authors examine the role that citizens’ identification with their community and with larger societal values has on shaping their reactions to the law and legal regulators.  They find, not surprisingly, that the strength of these connections predicts law-abidingness and perceptions of the legitimacy of legal authorities.  People who feel more connected to their communities show more deference to the law.

Finally, in the last few chapters, the authors tackle the issue of race and its effect on reactions to legal authorities.  Their data show that members of minority groups are less likely than whites to report that their experiences with the police and the courts were procedurally fair, and they are less likely to trust the motives of their local authorities.  The authors argue that from the perspective of process-based regulation, the implications of these findings are quite optimistic.  They suggest that the important issues raised by this study—perceived lack of trust, bias, dishonesty, and lack of concern for an individual’s rights—can be addressed through changes in training and management practices.  They reason that proper training will recondition police officers and judges to treat people with dignity and respect, rather than with contempt and condescension. They reason that the establishment of clear policies and standards that mandate treatment with dignity and respect will directly change the behavior of particular police officers on the street and judges on the bench.  Theoretically, the legitimacy of cops and courts will be enhanced among the public, and as a consequence, we will see greater willingness to comply with their directives.  Frankly, I wonder if the authors are overly-optimistic about the possibility that retraining individual officers and judges and reshaping their respective cultures can ameliorate long-held and deeply-entrenched beliefs.

I have a few other squabbles with the book.  Although reasonably well written and compelling in its thoroughness, there were significant redundancies—repetitions of hypotheses and results that quickly got tedious for the reader.  I think the book could have benefited from more fastidious copyediting.  My more serious concern relates to the fact that the book’s (and the study’s) findings may have limited applicability.  The authors acknowledge that they focus on strategies for regulating the behaviors of the general population of reasonably law-abiding citizens, and not the misbehaviors of the small group of people who are at highest risk of offending.  Indeed, perceptions of fairness and trustworthiness in legal authorities may affect the behavior of people who are already inclined to respect the law but may have little relevance to hard core offenders—primarily young, minority males. But in large part, this book does provide an optimistic picture of the ways with which most people should be dealt in order to enhance their willingness to obey the law.  I hope that the call for police officers and judges to treat people with civility and positive regard and thereby to enhance respect for, and obedience of, the law is a call that will be both heard and heeded.

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Copyright 2003 by the author, Edie Greene.