With procedural justice in the workplace and communication, things must be fair for all, if something is applied, it must be applied to everyone, and procedures must be in line with moral and ethical values. [ref. needed] A key element of the research is that the public is particularly concerned that government behaviour is fair, and this factor is more important to them than whether the results of certain interactions favour them. This means that procedurally fair policing is not consistent with traditional law enforcement policing, which generally assumes that compliance is primarily used to educate the public about the consequences – usually formal punishment – of non-compliance. Formal deterrence policing encourages the public to involve police services primarily in law enforcement and punitive outcomes. On the other hand, procedural policing emphasizes the values shared by police and communities – shared values based on a common vision of what social order is and how it should be maintained – and fosters the collaborative and voluntary maintenance of a law-abiding community. Research shows that the latter approach is much more effective at producing law-abiding citizens than the former. This makes intuitive sense – people welcome being treated equally, with an interest in the safety of their communities, rather than being treated as subjects of a capricious judicial system enforced by the police, which punishes them for ambiguous, even arbitrary reasons. Research on procedural justice in the criminal justice system has grown exponentially since John Thibaut and Laurens Walker published their seminal book Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis (Thibaut and Walker 1975).
In this book, the authors drew attention to how the processes of the justice system can influence perceptions of justice outcomes. However, it was Tom Tyler`s influential book Why People Obeying the Law (Tyler 1990) and Tyler and Yuen Huo`s article „Trust in the Law” (Tyler and Huo 2002) that highlighted the potential of how procedural justice could be applied in criminal law contexts to shape the perception of an organization`s legitimacy and promote voluntary compliance with that organization`s requests or laws. This section also contains a selection of core resources that characterize the development of procedural justice research. Thus, Solum 2004 offers an excellent critical introduction to the function, theory and importance of procedural justice. Törnblom and Vermunt 2007 instructively examine behavioral responses (e.g., retaliation) for procedural justice through the lens of resource theory. For an overview of empirical research conducted to date on this topic, see Donner, et al. 2015 and Mazerolle, et al. 2013. The first is a systematic review that focuses on the application of procedural justice in encounters with police and police organizations, while the second is a systematic review and meta-analysis of procedural justice as a mechanism to promote police legitimacy.
Bottoms and Tankebe 2012 convincingly discuss the importance of a „dialogical” approach to procedural justice to facilitate shared beliefs and legitimacy. Both Nagin and Telep 2017 and Tyler 2017 offer very interesting summaries of existing research on procedural justice and its limitations, as well as instructions for future research to advance the field. The goal of this course is to reintroduce the principles of procedural justice, gain a better understanding of the fundamental concepts of police legitimacy, and build better relationships within the communities we serve through the use of visual and scenario-based training. Read more This plenary session of the National Network for Safe Communities Conference provides an overview of the National Initiative to Build Trust and Justice in the Community and places it in the context of the post-Ferguson climate around trust, legitimacy, reform and reconciliation. Participants will discuss the genesis of the National Initiative, its objectives and early steps, as well as its relevance to the national interest of re-examining traditional criminal justice and promoting truth and reconciliation between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve. Moderated by David Kennedy, Director of the NNSC, this panel is composed of Katherine Darke Schmitt, Policy Advisor at the Office of Justice Programs of the U.S. Department of Justice, Tom Tyler, Macklin Fleming Professor of Law at Yale University, Tracie Keesee, Project Director of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, and Priscilla Hayner, independent author and advisor on truth and reconciliation processes.