Don't Jump the Shark: Understanding Deterrence and Legitimacy in the Architecture of Law Enforcement

These interviews followed the presentation "Don't Jump the Shark: Understanding Deterrence and Legitimacy in the Architecture of Law Enforcement" given as part of NIJ's Research for the Real World Seminar Series.

Tracey Meares, Deputy Dean, Walton Hamilton Professor, Yale Law School

• Using Deterrence and Legitimacy Research for Effective Policing
• Defining Police Legitimacy and Deterrence Mindsets
• How Police Conduct Affects Interaction Outcomes
• The Red Light: Why Do We Stop
• Cost Comparisons of Legitimacy and Deterrence
• Achieving Longer Lasting Compliance Through Legitimacy

Using Deterrence and Legitimacy Research for Effective Policing

Tracey Meares: Our current law enforcement policy is a get-tough law enforcement policy. It emphasizes punishment. It emphasizes detection of people who break the law. The ideas that I talk about in my work really look at the other side. And the other side of the question recognizes that most people obey the law most of the time, and that includes criminals, actually. And the question is, why?

Why do people obey the law? Do they obey the law because they fear the consequences of failing to do so, or do they obey the law because they think it's the right thing to do, or because they think that government agents, or—specifically in my case—police officers, have the right to dictate to them proper behavior?

It turns out, research shows, that it's overwhelmingly the latter—that people obey the law because they think it's right, or because they think that government agents have the right to tell them what to do. And when you embrace that idea, you find that you can achieve compliance that's longer-lasting, more pervasive, and cheaper than the deterrence-based approaches that require the existence of a threat and a following-through on it in every instance in order to achieve crime reductions.

Importantly, this does not mean that deterrence doesn't matter. It's important. It's an important tool. The point, however, is that if you organize your law-enforcement strategies to embrace legitimacy and procedural justice as opposed to deterrence, you'll get bigger bang for your buck.

Defining Police Legitimacy and Deterrence Mindsets

Tracey Meares: When thinking about deterrence theory, one way to get at that is to ask the question "Why do people obey the law?" Do they obey the law because they fear the consequences of failing to do so, or do they obey the law for other reasons?

Deterrence theory captures the answer to the first question. So people who subscribe to deterrence believe that people comply with the law because that person who is compliant fears the consequences of failing to do so. They think that they're going to be caught. They think they're going to be punished, and that's formal sanctions. Or, informally, they think that they're going to be shamed by their friends.

When thinking about legitimacy theories for compliance, you would ask a different question. If deterrence is captured by the idea that people obey the law because they fear the consequences of failing to do so, legitimacy is captured by a different idea, and that is that people comply with the law because they think it's the right thing to do, or because they think that government in general, specific law enforcers like the police, have the right to dictate to them proper behavior.

Now it's important to see that those two ideas are a little bit different. So if I'm obeying the law because I think it's the right thing to do, it's a little different from obeying the law because I think that you as a police officer have the right to tell me what to do.

How Police Conduct Affects Interaction Outcomes

Tracey Meares: Respect is very important. So that's the quality of treatment. Dignity, signs that the person who is interacting with you—and by "the person" I mean the law enforcer—thinks that you&re a person who counts, is very important. Signals and signs to the person who&s interacting with the police officer that that officer can be trusted to behave benevolently to the person stopped in the future is very important. And again, these ideas about neutrality and fairness matter.

When law enforcers can do this consistently, the benefit is not only that the person feels good about the encounter—that is, that they will say that they've been treated legitimately or in a procedurally just way — but, importantly, that procedural justice and legitimacy lead to compliance in the long run and therefore lower crime rate.

The Red Light: Why Do We Stop?

Tracey Meares: Imagine you're driving home from work at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, so the streets are deserted, and you come upon a stoplight. There's no one there. There's no other cars at the intersection. There's no one walking along the street. There are no police officers to be found anywhere. There's literally no one. It's you and the light. Do you stop? And if you stop, why are you stopping?

Now people who believe in deterrence would say that the reason why you're stopping is because you think that a police officer might jump out from around the corner and give you a ticket, or more informally—more informal notions of deterrence—your grandmother is going to come out and wag her finger at you and say, "I taught you better than that," and shame you. Those are deterrence-based reasons for complying.

But I think that the stoplight example captures nicely what legitimacy is about. You stop because you think it's the right thing to do. Or even if you don't think it's the right thing to do, you think it's silly that I'm standing here at a stoplight in the middle of the night. No one is there. You stop because you believe that the law that has been adopted that requires people to stop has ... is rightful, that you must obey that law, that our duly authorized representatives have adopted this law, and you subscribe to it. That's what legitimacy is about. And it gives you that long-term compliance; that's self-generated. It's internalized. Deterrence, on the other hand, is more of an external basis for compliance.

Cost Comparisons of Legitimacy and Deterrence

Tracy Meares: Once you see the distinction between these two ideas, I think it should be clear why a legitimacy-based approach to policing could be more fruitful in the long term. Because what legitimacy means is that people choose to voluntarily comply with the law whereas deterrence theory assumes, actually must assume, that there must be a sanction or someone to detect the wrongdoer and to punish the wrongdoer in order to achieve any kind of crime reduction. This means that deterrence is costly.

I'm not saying that deterrence doesn't work. Of course it does, right? People obviously are going to be motivated by the threat of sanction and the imposition of it. What's important is that social psychologists have shown that these legitimacy-based reasons are more important reasons to people for compliance. That is, they're more powerful and they last longer. Which means, if you're trying to achieve sort of general compliance or crime reduction in the long term, the legitimacy-based option is going to be cheaper for you.

Achieving Longer Lasting Compliance Through Legitimacy

Tracy Meares: Once you start thinking about the value of procedural justice and legitimacy to compliance, that it generalizes. So I have used police as my primary example because that's what I do, primarily. But these ideas of procedural justice have applicability in courts and in prison contexts. Any context where one cares about compliance with rules, this approach to thinking about the problem is going to be useful and even beyond criminal justice, actually. It has applicability in schools. It has applicability in corporate settings, in the workplace. It's a general idea, really, about how to achieve long term compliance.