Police legitimacy among immigrants in Europe: Institutional frames and group position
| Author | Jonathan Jackson,Ben Bradford |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370817749496 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370817749496
European Journal of Criminology
2018, Vol. 15(5) 567 –588
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370817749496
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Police legitimacy among
immigrants in Europe:
Institutional frames and
group position
Ben Bradford
University College London, UK
Jonathan Jackson
London School of Economics & Political Science, UK
Abstract
Recent research has begun to explore the extent to which factors beyond behaviour and
performance shape the empirical legitimacy of the police. In this paper, data from the European
Social Survey are used to explore the association between immigration and legitimacy. Starting from
the assumption that police legitimacy will vary between immigrant and non-immigrant populations,
we consider three distinct sets of variable that might explain such variation: contact with the
police, group position and the change in frames of reference that the act of migration engenders.
Findings suggest, first, that variables from all three groups predict legitimacy, with police contact
emerging as the most important. Second, conditional on these factors there is no difference in the
views of recent immigrants and their non-immigrant peers. However, other groups of immigrants
– particularly those who migrated as children – tend to grant the police somewhat less legitimacy.
Keywords
European Social Survey, group position, immigration, police legitimacy
Recent research has indicated that a wide range of factors – beyond performance – can
shape the legitimacy of the police (for example, Antrobus et al., 2015; Jackson et al.,
2013; Mehozay and Factor, 2017). The ways in which people experience not
Corresponding author:
Ben Bradford, Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London, 35 Tavistock Square,
London WC1H 9EZ, UK.
Email: ben.bradford@ucl.ac.uk
749496EUC0010.1177/1477370817749496European Journal of CriminologyBradford and Jackson
research-article2018
Article
568 European Journal of Criminology 15(5)
just policing but also their wider social, cultural and economic environment – and the
location of police and policed within structures of power, authority and affect – have
important effects on lay judgements of this foundational state institution (Weitzer and
Tuch, 2006) and, in turn, its empirical legitimacy.
In this paper we consider whether occupying one particular ‘location’ in society
explains variation in people’s judgements of police legitimacy. We investigate the extent
to which the socio-structural position and experiences of immigrants predict attitudes
toward the ‘rightful authority’ of the police. The presence of growing immigrant popula-
tions in many European countries has become a topic of fierce political debate, often
revolving directly or indirectly around the bond between immigrants and the institutions
of their new home (Anderson, 2013). In particular, the relationship between the police
and immigrant groups is frequently painted as being almost inevitably problematic.
Immigrant populations are often young and economically disadvantaged and composed
of people who, in the context within which they live, are from ethnic, racial and religious
minorities – all characteristics known to predict negative experiences of police. The
increasing criminalization of migration – or, at the very least, the well-documented turn
toward the use of criminal justice actors to regulate and control migration – adds another
set of reasons for imagining immigrants will be at best wary of police (Armenta, 2016;
Van der Woude and Brouwer, 2017; Weber, 2011). Theorists and commentators on, and
beyond, the political right have argued that immigration undermines social and cultural
norms and a sense of shared community (for example, Goodhart, 2013; West, 2013).
Police garner trust and legitimacy when people feel a shared sense of belonging, inclu-
sion and shared values (Jackson et al., 2013). But immigrants, it is claimed, are less
likely to feel a sense of ‘social solidarity’ with those around them, and therefore with the
police (see Putnam, 2007).
Yet the available evidence suggests a more nuanced picture. Analysis of large-scale
surveys such as the European Social Survey (ESS; Röder and Mühlau, 2012), the Crime
Survey of England and Wales (Bradford et al., 2017) and the World Values Survey
(Nannestad et al., 2014) suggests that, at least in some contexts, immigrants’ views of the
police can actually be more positive on average than those of their native-born counter-
parts. One possible explanation focuses on the change in ‘institutional frames’ that immi-
grants experience as they move from origin to destination countries. In a paper that
foreshadowed the current contribution, Röder and Mühlau (2012) found that, across 21
European countries, immigrants who had moved from high to low corruption countries
had higher levels of trust in the police than the native-born (see also Röder and Mühlau,
2011). Immigrants may judge the trustworthiness of the police in the destination country
partly on the basis of the (un)trustworthiness of the police in the origin country.
This paper advances the literature in three ways. First, we draw upon data from Round
5 of the ESS, which contained an unusually rich collection of measures relating to
police–public relations. The dataset used in this paper covers 27 countries, has a sample
size of 52,458, and contains 4962 first-generation immigrants hailing from a total of 166
countries. Second, we assess the relevance of institutional frames alongside important
contextual factors. We include in our models a set of criminologically relevant variables
as potential predictors of legitimacy – for example, victimization and contact with the
police – alongside measures of social and economic position and change in contexts
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