We're very lucky today to have just this time having just come over from Cambridge University and where we have expertise in quite a lot of things, I think. How did criminology sentencing go on the death penalty and go? It's just how I know it's work. And also, after many years of research on the area of policing and in particular, police legitimacy, and that's what he's going to talk about today. So welcome to you both. Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everyone.
Thank you to Caroline and to Ian for the opportunity to be here. I just would like and this something I prefer to talk about one of my areas of research, which is police legitimacy. Essentially, my argument is to look at the various ways that we could improve the current conceptualisation of the concept.
All right. If you Google has got this interesting software because in gram view, which allows you to track trends in the use of particular ways and phrases we've managed to compile, you see about 200 million books from about the 16th century or so to 2008. So when you put in particular phrases, it tells you the trends over time. Of course, we can fit the entire period here. So we look between the period 1980 to 2008.
And what we see is an interesting trend that until about the early 1980s, much of the emphasis appears to have been on criminal deterrence. And we see quite a sudden inflection point here that legitimacy has become much more common in the books that at least they looked at. Of course, this doesn't include journalists, so it's not really a great no hard conclusions can be drawn. And interestingly, if we change this to cops in the trenches, it's the other way round.
So it is indicative rather than anything. If you put procedural justice into it, you will see quite a marked gap between the references to legitimacy of criminal deterrence and procedure justice in the relevant text. Much of that change in the fortunes of legitimacy, so to speak, I think can be attributed to some tireless work in the US or regionally with his book Why People Obey the Law.
And he later developed this model that essentially the reasons people obey the law is because they think of the law or of legal authorities as being legitimate, and perceptions of legitimacy are based on experiences of fair treatment from legal authorities. So it is not the outcomes or the favourable outcomes that people receive from legal authorities, but how fairly they think they have been treated by those relevant authorities.
And he argues that fair treatment encourages people to think of police as being legitimate, which then feeds into an attitude of compliance and support for police authorities. There is also the additional argument here that fair treatment encourages immediate decision acceptance and long term compliance with the law because the evidence on long term compliance is quite weak.
Okay. So these are the key findings from the relevant literature that when police forces or legal authorities are considered to be legitimate, we should expect more compliance, more cooperation, greater satisfaction, and even less support for vigilante violence across the different communities. And a number of, I think both police forces and even at the government level have taken notice of this.
These findings from the literature that more recently the US president has a task force following the incidents in Ferguson to look into policing in the US. And the interim report has, as its first pillar, the need for police forces to cultivate legitimacy and for justice, both within police institutions and into our relations with relevant communities. So it seems to me that on the evidence, this is a powerful notion that one needs to take seriously.
But an interesting observation from the literature is the various different ways that legitimacy has been measured. So I said earlier that if you look at the literature, what are the impressions you get? Or one of the evidence is that legitimacy encourages cooperation with police forces. But that conclusion hides a lot of things, not least the variations in the measurement of the concept.
So if to me, legitimacy as trust and confidence assumptions, that is something I and others are saying it's obligation to obey. Then the conclusions drawn are a little bit shaky in that respect because we are not referring to the same thing unless we argue that obligation to obey and trust and confidence. I wanted to see which I think would be a difficult argument to sustain. And there's a price, of course, to this kind of conceptual ambiguity, as I would put it.
One is that it doesn't really advance our theoretical understanding of the concept, and a discussion on the problem is not resolved simply by applying concern, complex or advanced statistical analysis to the issue. If, for example, I also argue trust and obligation are different concepts from legitimacy, then it doesn't really matter the level of sophistication in our analysis of trust and obligation.
It wouldn't resolve the issue. So it tells us that simply devising new technical instruments, more or less, dances around the issue at hand. I'm arguing that there are at least two limitations in the current literature. The first is what I've already alluded to, that there's a tendency to reduce legitimacy, to trust and obligation to obey feelings of obligation, to obey legal authority. And secondly, there is much of the evidence is based on community surveys and interviews.
While that is useful and I have done a lot of that work and I continue to do so, I think an exclusive focus on that limits this planetary value of the concept. And I will try to show that later. We'll talk. So first of all, let's start with some dictionaries. Some have made the argument that dictionary definition should not guide criminological analysis. Fine, I understand, but at least it's a starting point to see what an ordinary usage of the term we mean by legitimacy.
And here, of course, being an Oxford Oxford English Dictionary gives us some of these definitions. One that when we talk about legitimacy, we are talking about a condition of being lawful or being in accordance with a principle. And we could read the principle here to mean may be values or norms within particular communities. That, again, is emphasised in the second definition. So here there is no references to obligation to obey.
As such, there is no reference to trust. And you can go through the list of definitions that Oxford University Press provides. And I you can trust me on this. There is no references to any of these either of those concepts. Website English Dictionary makes a similar point that when we talk about legitimacy in the ordinary meaning of the term, we are talking about law. We are talking about accepted rules as standards, which, again, what norms? The norms are the accepted rules or standards.
That supposed to guide behaviour in particular situations. Secondly, on the issue of trust, I think there is no doubt that or at least one could make the argument that trust and legitimacy are perhaps intimately related. But they seem to me to be quite different concepts that we could easily think of situations where people trust legal institutions but do not consider those institutions to be legitimate.
So for example, I don't know how to drive, but if I did and I had a master blender how to make an insurance claim. A requirement might be that I produced a police report and imagine that I thought of the Oxford or Cambridge police as being deeply illegitimate. That still will not prevent me from going to them if I really wanted to claim my insurance to go to them for the relevant documentation to do that.
Now I might trust them to provide me the services that I require without necessarily thinking of them. Must be legitimate in that respect. Okay. And one, of course, could also think of legitimacy as being one of the conditions that allow people to be more trusting of institutions. But if I thought an institution was legitimate, I might be more inclined to trust it than if I didn't think so.
So if we look at the definitions of trust and and legitimacy, it's very hard to see how we can make one do the job of the other, so to speak. Okay. So then my argument that if those two or three concepts are different and I'm sure we have the chance to to get into this further, then there's a need for us to probably chart a different course, to look beyond measuring legitimacy in terms of obligation to be on trust.
Of course, one of the arguments that we made originally was that feelings of obligation to build legal institutions might be the result of fear, might be the result of what are human combined calls in the prison context, drawing on marks of dark compulsion. But people are faced with structural situations where they believe they have no option but to be legal institutions.
Or if we think about James Scott's distinction between public and hidden transcripts in relation to power, that the situation is so stacked against some individuals that at least when you when you ask the question, do you feel an obligation to obey those institutions, people might immediately say yes, without necessarily that obligation being normatively based. But even if we establish that, the obligation we are referring to is not one that is based on fear.
It's not one that is based on compulsion, but it is, quote unquote, genuine feelings of obligation to obey legal institutions. That does not itself suggest that we have resolved the problem of conflation of the concepts. Okay. The argument I would make is that legitimacy is what encourages people to feel an obligation to obey legal institutions, which then might translate into actual behavioural outcomes.
Okay. One of the reasons not doing dealing in charting that different course, of course our starting point in the social sciences is always Magaziner and he makes the point that legitimacy is the most stable basis for powerful authority and therefore conjectures that every system of authority seeks to cultivate legitimacy for itself.
And we know how. He goes on to talk about the different grounds on which legitimacy might be nurtured or cultivated, resulting in his three fold cosmology of traditional, charismatic and legal, rational authority. Okay, so the definition I will start with is the definition that there would be some officers more recently, which is that when we talk about legitimacy, we are talking about the recognition of the right to govern. Ascension and that this recognition involves at least two parties.
And he sees a third party whose recognition might be important in that respect. And later on, towards the end of the of the talk, I will come back to this issue of third parties, especially when we make that distinction between what some call empirical legitimacy and normative legitimacy, what happens within particular societies, and what some supra state standards or requirements might be. But at least this is the definition that we want to go with.
And this, I think, are the three really important features of it, that legitimacy is essentially normative in the sense that, as someone argues, it is deeply social, it's based on the norms, the values within a particular context. And regardless of what an individual powerful that might believe, someone says, even though one may jump up and down claiming to be legitimate, it doesn't really produce much recognition if it is not linked to the norms and values within the particular society.
Secondly, that legitimacy is not a binary either or kind of concept. It's a it's a conditional. It's something that happens as a matter of degree, but there's more or less of it rather than nothing at all. And that often it's because you are dealing with not one particular audience, but a multiplicity of audiences.
So if you want to provide an overall scorecard for a legitimate police institution, it's quite unlikely that all these different audiences would have thought of the police being somehow illegitimate. Look again what the Ferguson Police Department does. Would you imagine that everybody would think of them as being the illegitimate set? Is that legitimacy ostensibly to park all this onto their audiences? The point here is that it is not for the recognition of power.
It is not sufficient to just rely on what power audiences think. An equally important issue, which Max Weber emphasised, was the need for powerful ideas themselves to believe in the in the rightness of their positions and the authority. We are not talking here about police officers, for example, perceptions of the legitimacy of the police department. No, we are talking about the individual officers personal legitimacy in those circumstances.
And. Part of the argument here then, is that it's useful for us to think of legitimacy as a continuous dialogue of a claim, a constant claim of response between powerful ideas and the different audiences. We have the multiple audiences within that particular society. The powerful. This might begin with a claim.
So, for example, we might think that stop and search is a useful tool in the particular police area, and we start to implement or practice this particular strategy and we might have a claim or a response from the audience is either at the national level or during everyday encounters with the police forces and police officers might revise the claim in future transactions. Of course, that depends on the context.
If it's such a political context that powerful this thing, they are not accountable to past subjects or audiences, then this might not apply. Okay, so what is it then that powerful do so audiences come to this dialogue? What is it that if spectrum cardholders. What are the conditions that allow people to ascribe what recognised power as being legitimate?
I've recently come across a work by Bernard Williams and he suggested that almost in every society there is what he called the first basic political question, which is how do we create order? How do we create the conditions that allow for trusts, that allow for cooperation among individuals and that meeting power holders that meets what he calls basic legitimation demands. The powerful Nasdaq will be recognised as being legitimate, so we might think of it this way a kind of imaginary dialogue.
So we are, and it can be complete chaos and disorder. And someone says, I can drink. I can establish order. I can create the conditions that allow us to go about our various routines without hindrance. And we say, okay, we will recognise your authority, we recognise your power to do that if you are able to meet certain basic legitimation demands. Okay, we set in some boundaries within which you are supposed to or conditions for which you're supposed to exercise that authority.
And Williams argues that meeting those basic legitimation demands is what distinguishes a legitimate state and legitimate system of domination from an illegitimate form. And he makes the point further, which I find very interesting, that the satisfaction of these basic legitimation demands, the nature of these basic legitimation demands varies historically, so they haven't always been the kind of liberal conditions or liberal demands. And he goes on fed up to see that now and today.
It seems that liberal demands are the only ones that are acceptable and others are not welcome. But I think the fundamental point he makes here is how the conditions for legitimacy, the grounds on which people ascribe legitimacy to institutions, vary across societies.
And I think that's an important point, because if we take legitimacy as simply obligation to obey, then what we are suggesting is that in almost every society, especially when we use community service, it's a question of how strongly people agree or disagree with this issue, rather than allowing for the community to tell us what the conditions for legitimacy within those specific instances.
And that links to fear the point that Bentham made, which is that legitimacy is always, of course, a question of context, that a sociologist of social sciences, we know that societies differ. And as I said earlier, norms and values are central to the question of legitimacy. And to the extent that values and beliefs vary across different societies, we should expect that the nature of legitimacy would accordingly vary.
But he makes the point, in spite of that, that it is still possible to identify what he calls underlying structure of. Something that is common across all different communities, even if the substantive nature of those elements will vary accordingly. So it's a notion that is similar to what, for example, Blue tells us about what he calls sensitising concepts, that social concepts are sensitising concepts in the sense that they manifest themselves differently in different social context.
It's a similar notion here. So in a paper that I published with Toni Bottoms, we argued that these might be some of the legitimation demands that people make of power, people make of legal institutions. But these are the demands when they meet would distinguish them from illegitimate state institutions. We are not, of course, arguing that this is exhausted.
We're saying this at least that's a conjecture hypothesis about what you might find across different societies as being the grounds for legitimacy. Okay, let's look at this further. Of course, the question of lawfulness. The one of the basic or what we might say, BLT one. What would it be? These would be that power be seen as being consistent with the rules as they are currently operating in each society.
And we will come later when we look at the example of some cases recently to see how this might fit what we are talking about. But this would seem self-explanatory that a source of power if police say they have the power to do stop and search. The question is, where does that power come from? Is it consistent with the law as currently validated and the nature that a power, even if it were consistent with the law, how the power is synthesised and it also to conform with the rules.
Of course, police corruption, police criminality will be instances of breach of the rules of police. Listening into people's conversations without the requisite legal permit will be instances of that. But of course, we are told from social legal studies that there is always a gap between the law on the everyday norms and or normative consciousness of of communities.
And that is a mistake for us to think as Tamannaah argues, against what you call the mere thesis that the law necessarily reflect the values of communities, that if you take, for example, the case of post-colonial societies, this one in point, even in Western democratic multicultural societies, it's very hard to argue that no laws necessarily reflect prevailing values as such. So Bithumb makes the point that law cannot justify itself by reference to itself.
You need some sort of external reference to the values within that particular community in order to be legitimate. And he talks about shared values within communities, a notion that is similar to what John Jackson calls moral alignment but powerful. This idea, audiences share common values systems because those values system them provide, if you like, the fountain for justifying power, for justifying the law.
But of course, just talking about shared values or moral alignment, well, that general notion is useful. It is still possible for us to go beyond that, to speculate, at least to hypothesise about specific values that might be important in different cultural context.
So, for example, John Donne in his book Setting the People Free, tells us that the reason democracy is so appealing or has won debateable, as we put it, is because of the notion of equality, that that's a notion that almost every person finds attractive. So I'm suggesting that obviously just the the first or at least one of the specific shared values is that of distributive justice.
What extent does power allocate resources in a way that it's not discriminatory in the way that is fair across different competing groups within a particular society? Is it ethnic differences? Is a social class?
Is a political affiliation or religious concerns that at least in liberal democratic societies, we would expect that the notion that the individual has dignity, has respect and are entitled to these, and that it is unfair to discriminate against that individual on the basis of his particular characteristics. It's one that will be consistent with this. So we can look at it in terms of how police allocated their resources across different communities, different social groups.
But of course, for us, for those who are also interested in perceptual studies, it's also, at least in the literature, often measured as perceptions of the fairness of outcomes that people receive. So defines a decision to address the decision to stop and search examples of the outcomes that people might perceive to be fair or not. But essentially, it comes down to the issue of being overpoliced and protected, for example.
And there's a lot in this area consistent with Ian's notion of policing as a public good, for example. So, of course, one of the contentious areas where distributive justice or at least injustice arises, there is a stop and search. And always when you look at the statistics, at least on the face of it, appear to suggest that there is some injustice in the distribution of this piece, if you like, from full power to the punishment from some power, so to speak.
The second and therefore the third legitimation demand is what we know from the literature quite extensively. It's the notion of procedure justice defined essentially as perceived fairness of out of treatment. And Tyler speaks or writes extensively about issues that relate to accountability in the sense of police officers having to give a reason for their decisions.
So when people have interactions with the police, the research suggests, and they're making a judgement about whether the processes of being fair, one of two dimensions are implicated and one is the quality of decision making and the elements of the quality of decision making are the perceptions of reasons being given for a particular course of action. So if I'm being arrested, why is that the case? It's just not the issue that, given the reason, mean I wouldn't be arrested.
I would be in a way, but is still given the reason for that particular answer. What are people are encouraged, in fact, to, as it were, put across the other side of the story, their input in the decision making process, the notion that it's used extensively in the literature is that of neutrality, although some argue that impartiality is to be preferred because neutrality is a bit more of a passive notion.
And of course, the issue of quality of of treatment, respect, dignity, recognition for the individual. But also I would suggest later that when we think about this in terms of not conceptual studies or community service, it is still possible to to think about mechanisms of accountability or these oversight institutions that we have and here have referred to the paper Ian wrote with Richard Sparks, drawing on violence, work on democratic legitimation, participation and the others.
So, for example, is, is a depiction of of the kind of recognition, the kind of respect that people get from the New York police when they do their stop and search. And last year, there was a really interesting case where the New York police went on Twitter telling people, if you've got photographs of us, share it with us. And people began to share the really outrageous photographs about police high-handedness and suddenly the account was taken about.
They didn't want to know about this, but it's an instance of this that, as I said, at least in some political cultures, the notion people are entitled to a respectful, dignified treatment, a recognition of them as being human is an important specific value or legitimation demand. So essentially a demand we will make of police forces is that, yes, you've got a right to use stop and search powers, but we demand that you do so in a way that recognises us as human beings, not us.
The other party, the UK, the force legitimation demand and therefore the, if you like you say the third specific value. And this is a bit more contentious because in the literature on legitimacy we often treat effectiveness as a purely instrumental notion. It's got nothing to do with the more normative concept of legitimacy.
But actually, if you go back to Ben Williamson's point, which is that we have a political question, and that question is how can we create the conditions for cooperation, the conditions for trust, how can we maintain order within our communities? And you said I can do that. And then it follows that the extent to which you are able to execute that duty will be not purely an instrumental issue.
It's a normative requirement. Police forces are not vested with the power they have because we want them to treat us fairly. I feel we can do that about ourselves without the police getting involved. Not that we want them to distribute punishment and they don't do rewards, they just distribute punishment. So maybe sometimes a bit of protection. But it's an.
To me that the effectiveness of the police in contributing to solving that original political question will be one of the normative requirements or one of the legitimation demands people make of those in power. And Robert Peel Tools, it tells us initially about the reason for the police is that we wanted someone, some authority which could contribute to preventing crime and disorder in local communities. Of course, we know today that the police just don't do crime prevention and disorder.
They do a lot of other social what they consider to be social services. But the point is that this is the basic reason for for the police. And that is really the question about legitimacy. A.C. is about why does this institution have the right to exist and to exercise these kind of powers?
And it seems to me that, in fact, our starting point should always be the extent to which that institution demonstrates effectiveness in this case, the police, in contributing to that resolution of that question. But of course, we will stop there. We won't be cops. Thomas Hobbs, stop at that particular answer. The effectiveness is sufficient to address that question.
And Williams tries to defend cops here by arguing that one, the conditions in which cops was writing were so dire that he thought the state or the person who is able to create or to solve that particular first question, what I've done enough to warrant legitimacy without the need for anything extra. But of course, it doesn't mean he supports terror, because that is the very issue that he was trying to to resolve.
Okay. So if we took that together, a very simple model, unlike the one that we started with, is that when we talk about legitimacy as a multi dimensional concept, these are at least four of its elements that we can think about.
As I say, there's scope for more depending on the methodological approach that we are and that it is this one institution, or when the police make these legitimation demands, that creates the feeling of obligation to obey the police, which might then lead into actual behavioural outcomes. Okay. Of course it could have a direct impact. The very fact that you consider what the police do to be lawful might encourage you to to want to obey the law or otherwise.
This is a quote from. The point I should have made earlier that legitimacy is not new to criminology. If you go back to drug offences, causes of delinquency, his notion of belief and even attachment has a lot of references to legitimacy in it. Okay. What we often do in cases like this is that when we have come up with this hypothesis about the dimensions of legitimacy, we could use confirmatory factor analysis to see whether the data fits this particular model.
You could try this. I've done it in the paper previously using data from London, which suggests that that's the case. This is a paper that I'm writing with colleagues from the US using samples from Ghana and the US suggesting that the estimate of my feet. But that is not really my concern here. If you look at the literature from prisons, this is on this and libraries work on the moral performances of prisons.
What distinguishes are being poor performing and good performing prisons can actually be read as being less or more legitimate prisons. And you can see the sense that the quality of such prisons. Yes. There's no explicit references to lawfulness in this case. But respect for relations or respect and good relationships are essentially things to do with procedure, justice in some respect. Fairness here could be read in terms of both procedure and distributive aspect security.
We are talking about effectiveness within prisons. But we can move beyond the perceptual studies to look at cases like this. So one of the reasons I think it's helpful to not only continue to do interviews and civil based studies, but also to use, quote unquote, other sources of data or come back to that data. But also, I think, to move beyond the obligation to be in motion, because this is a particular aspect of public policy.
And how are we going to analyse this particular instance by relying on obligation to debate what what's the judgement that we're going to make in the activities of GCA HQ and the NSC? If we've seen that legitimacy has, it's about obligation to be okay. We are told the NSA has gone and done something really terrible. So we are interested in analysing the legitimacy of what they have done.
How do we go about this? If our plans, if we rely almost exclusively on an obligation and we see that in the discussion that followed, the questions that people ask about the NSA, his activities read a presidential report commissioned into into what the NSA and then we have questions about whether the activities were constitutional. Right. Did Congress know about the actions of the NSA? It's a question of lawfulness. Is this lawful?
And when it became clear that the Intelligence Select Committee, or at least some members knew about this, that somehow if you read the small print in the Patriot Act, there were somewhere they suggested that they could do what they were. They were doing the discussion, quote, quickly to look at what is the evidence that this is effective. Show us the evidence that this particular strategy has prevented terrorism.
And again, if you read the report, it's very, very hard to does the conclusion they come to. That is no evidence to suggest that these are listening into people's conversations and all those other things that we read about contributed in any way to preventing attacks. And, of course, The New York Times tells us this was ineffective and constitutionally dangerous. We are told that it's an activity that violates fundamental rights to privacy.
So this is an issue in part about procedure, justice, because remember, we said a key element of it is recognition, respect for that particular individual. Some also suggested and in fact, the presidential report says, that there's a tendency that this could be used to target people with particular political or religious views, a concern about distributive injustice in the use of this particular tool or issue.
So this is a legitimacy assessment of the actions of the NSA and questions about whether we then have an obligation to obey that institution. Secondly, to this, we first have to establish in part, did the NSA act legitimately? We have tried to answer that by references to this. If it was an institution like the police that we deal with on a day to day basis, the NSA doesn't care whether you feel an obligation to abate or not because it doesn't require it.
It will listen in the way we do all the things that they want it to do anyway. But imagine this was a police force and we ask asking these basic questions. The question then about whether we have an obligation to obey arise as a consequence to this just a sequel to this particular issue rather than being one and the same. And I think that really broadens our analytical framework, for example, because one might wonder why really would the NSA do this?
Didn't they know that people would be rather outraged by some of these issues? I said earlier that part of the legitimacy is an important aspect of it. So let's imagine that the NSA thought about it very carefully and they were really confident that this is an illegitimate action to undertake.
Right. So high, medium, low legitimacy, obviously, the public have responded at least some aspects of the public, those who are really concerned about some of the things that they were doing by saying, no, we think of this as being illegitimate custody and. The reason this all set in motion various attempts to try to reform what the NSA does. Okay. So I can come back to this later, if you wish. But also, let's take another example. And really, I think most of us who know about been lawyers.
It's a particular murder of this young man. The police have done their investigations. I'm sure they were really confident that what they had done was was appropriate, including sending undercover officers to surveil the victims families. But the response to this was that this really violates deep values within this particular community, that it's because they come from a particular social background that to investigate this. So I'm not familiar with the case. Could you. Okay. Okay.
So civil Lawrence was, of course, a young black man in the early nineties who was murdered by, I think, three young white guys. And the police initially did not diagnose the issue as being a racially motivated incident, properly activity at all. And the investigations into it was rather shoddy. Okay. Missing key evidence.
And the families of the family of the victim refused to accept the police's botched the prosecutions and all that, and made a lot of campaigning against the police activity, which resulted in 1997 and a commission of inquiry which said that the police had acted in a way that was institutionally racist, not that the police were formally racist, but at least there were some norms of culture within the police force, which meant that they treated people of certain background differently.
Okay. So the point I'm making here is that even if the police could prove to us that what they did was lawful, then therefore kickstarts the commission demand box. There was the additional question about whether this was fair distributed, whether the way they treated the families, for example, sending in undercover officers to just revealed that that family was fair.
So some of these questions arise in the but I think the also important issue when we think about legitimacy in this sense is that it expands the explanatory value of the concept. So a lack of legitimacy is not only restricted to an issue of obeying or disobeying the law at a very micro level, but it has implications for organisational stability and change. So this particular instance, as we saw with even the NSA's case, resulted in legislative changes.
But because the police acted illegitimately, some of these followed. Okay. So just bringing it to an end, because you are now, right? No, no. They started it up. Oh, okay. Okay. Excellent. All right. So the point I've been trying to make is that this notion of basic legitimation demand, I think, offers us some opportunity to build on what we currently know. But there's also, I think, some important additional issues for us to bear in mind.
One is this distinction often made between normative and empirical legitimacy. As social scientists, we tend to focus on this partly through Max Weber's influence. That legitimacy, the conditions for legitimacy are those within the particular community, all of society.
So if in all souls, we agree that these are the basic legitimation demands for the police, that the effective, the the lawful, that they can discriminate based on racial considerations, for example, or gender considerations, and that would be sufficient to establish legitimate use of their standard. That is, the demands satisfied within that community. Of course, we know the dangers with this relying exclusively on what happens within particular societies.
So people argue that we should try to bridge the gap between the normative and the empirical. The normative mean somehow we have some benchmark on the basis of which we try to judge the legitimacy or otherwise of police actions, for example, in different communities. And if we take the case of the EU or Europe, the European Human Rights Convention might be your starting point as a kind of normative benchmark.
Okay. So if the police do something I don't like, I think they violated my my rights and the whole of England and Wales things. Yes. What the police do. I could appeal to this higher normative power authority for some sort of redress. And we know countless examples of people having done this. Of course, this notion of normative legitimacy is not some God given I. It's you could argue that it's somewhat this empirical legitimacy, some of these values that are being used to judge everyone else.
Right. I'm sure we can have that discussion. The second issue is I think we need some sort of maybe not methodological innovation by variation in the approach to legitimacy. I think we need more qualitative studies, not in terms of testing theories to see, but at least as the first step to developing some of these survey instruments. Let's go to Afghanistan or Guyana and engage with the people and interview them.
Do whatever qualitative methods we can. We can apply to understand what the basic legitimation demands of power are in this particular context, and we can then use that as the basis for building the civil instruments. If that is what we want to do. So this could be a first step. It could be sufficient on its own, or it could be the basis on which we develop civil instruments for community studies.
I think this is a useful approach, of course, because I've said many times, but it also I think it leaves room for some sort of surprise. Okay. Rather than always using the same instrument across different contexts. And people just tell you what could they tell us? They could only tell us whether they agree or disagree. Right. But if we are starting from bottom up to understand what is it, how do people perceive power? What are the expectations of power? What are the demands they make of power?
It might emerge that they are not talking about even effectiveness. Maybe they are not even talking about lawfulness. It would be strange if they don't, but all they're talking about, all these four demands, plus something else that we wouldn't have thought about. So I think there's some merit in doing that. There's also a merit and going beyond, but not, of course, abandoning or jettisoning perceptual studies and looking at official statistics of some sort.
Of course, we know the problems with official statistics, but I think I mean, if, for example, how to use some of this data in trying to link legitimacy to homicide rates across different countries. And also, if you read a recent report on the Ferguson Police Department by the attorney general, what you find is that the police are actually kept data, very good data. It turns out on the canine units, the drugs that they use to try to constrain people.
And in analysing the legitimacy of the the police department, the one of the things they looked at is how the dogs are used across different racial groups. And they conclude that in almost every case that the data were available, they were used against African-Americans. Okay. And it's one of the basis with which the police department is literally being threatened, that if you don't put your arms together, we're going to shut you down, essentially.
So there is room for us to do this. And actually, if you read some book, he argues against opinion data. I disagree with that. But we should even use survey data at all. We could just rely on some of this, but of course that's only half true. We could also try and do more of longitudinal studies to try to understand the life course of a police organisation,
for example, in terms of its legitimacy. How does the police all in fact, what works in repairing damage to police legitimacy and how does it work? So for example, if a police organisation like Ferguson is hit with these kind of troubles, how does it repair what works in the particular case? What are the conditions that prevailed before these things happened?
Could we have predicted that based on data that we probably collected on effectiveness and lawfulness, on distributive justice or procedure justice? So it'll be interesting for us to to see how that turns out if we were to pursue some of those studies. Of course, we are told that the legitimacy of this is not just informed by these related variables. We are structural issues, socio political, economic conditions.
But unfortunately, most of the perceptual studies where we measure gender, race, income levels, we only introduce them into our regression models as control variables. Okay. We don't really go beyond that to look at the structural conditions, the issue of social exclusion or otherwise, and all the other factors that I think we could take a bit more seriously in the light of this historical data or assertion.
Okay. So just to reiterate, understanding legitimacy in terms of this continuous dialogue on the sort of demands that people make of power during this dialogue is a very I think it's a promising avenue for understanding a bit more than just everyday law abiding behaviour. It's room for us to do. It offers the scope for us to do policy analysis in terms of legitimacy, to understand, as some have argued recently, how crime policy is made within particular context.
And of course, in the same way that at the end of this talk, there'll be a lot of dialogues going on, conversations going on. They are all different. And globally there will be different dialogues going on within different contexts. So legitimacy of the dialogue offers us a useful opportunity to to understand the nature and the meaning of legitimacy within particular context. And this might be different across different contexts. But thank you very much for your time.